Your Cock Is Not a Divining Rod

In this slightly feverish, slightly feral episode, Catharine continues on from her commentary about David King publicly calling women’s armpit hair “repulsive,” and unpacks the much bigger question underneath it:

Why are women expected to remain visually pleasing to strangers in the first place?

Catharine talks about:

• body commentary at family functions,
• fat-shaming disguised as “health,”
• the entitlement behind public ridicule,
• why shame and control get confused with concern,
• the exhausting pressure to remain aesthetically acceptable,
• and the connection she sees between everyday objectification and broader cultures of misogyny.

Also featured:

• Lawrence the camp dog,
• a rawhide providing temporary podcast stability,
• one very sick podcaster,
• and the phrase “your dick is not a divining rod,” which honestly deserves its own merch line.

This episode contains discussion of body shaming, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and misogyny.

Content Note
This podcast gets into bodies, panic attacks, trauma, sexism, mental health, and the occasional emotional sinkhole. Please look after yourself only listen when you feel safe to engage with potentially triggering material. 
Also, I swear.

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Credits
Recorded on the lands of the Ramindjeri and Ngarrindjeri peoples.
Sovereignty never ceded.

Recorded & edited at Ridley Farm Studio by Luke Ridley
https://ridleyfarmstudio.com.au...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, hello. This is your brand new episode of The C-Word with Catherine Redden. I'm Catherine, by the way. I actually didn't think I was going to release an episode this week. I don't know if you can hear it in my voice, but I've been physically sick for a change, not mentally unwell, not panic attacks, not my nervous system deciding it's under siege because, well, who the fuck knows? But an actual very real human body illness. Um so you know, I haven't really been up to, and it's not just the fact that I can't speak or I'm coughing or I have sweats or whatever, it's also that my brain's a bit foggy, but I really wanted to put an episode out this week. I'm also we're still putting the finishing touches on a really big interview I did with Simon Graham, which I I cannot wait to be released. I think sometime next week that will come out. It's just not quite ready yet. I'm also interviewing somebody really special tomorrow morning, and then next week I've got um interviewees lined up as well. So I've kind of got a lot bubbling, but not a lot ready to actually come out of the oven. So I thought, oh, I won't do an episode this week. But I've been thinking about something ever since I released my last episode, and once my brain starts circling on something like that, um, like a seagull over chips, unfortunately, we all have to participate, dear listener. So the last episode I released was called David King, You're a Dick. Which honestly I thought was a little bit cheeky at the time, and I'm still surprised that his people haven't contacted my people, aka me, and asked me to change the title. But here we are. And if you listen to that episode, this one will make sense. But if you didn't, here's a really quick recap. A sports commentator in Australia called David King publicly said on the radio that he found women's armpit hair repulsive. Now, he was making a joke, but I don't really care. He said it, he doubled and tripled down on it, and he referenced the armpit hair being unhygienic as well as physically repulsive. Now, here's the thing: it is completely fine to not personally like armpit hair. Human beings are allowed to find different things attractive or unattractive. That is not the issue. The issue is that saying it publicly in a way that turns another person's body into a commodity because you don't personally want to look at it, that's a problem. Because what you are sexually attracted to is private information. We've normalized this really strange cultural habit where people, particularly women, are expected to modify themselves according to the visual preference of strangers. We're all expected to fit a particular ideal so blokes find us attractive. And if they don't, if we don't, people, men particularly, feel really entitled to comment. Like, really entitled. I mean, it's not just Instagram or TikTok where people feel they don't they feel so entitled they don't even think about commenting on it. But it's at family functions, it's in staff meetings, um, you hear it all the time. People will comment on other people's bodies. Um, they might say something like, and they might do it obliquely, they might say something, they might, rather than commenting on the person's body, they'll comment on what they're eating, or they'll say, Oh, you've look you look like you've been in a good paddock, meaning the person's put on weight since they saw them last. Um, it's if you go to a family function, you'll notice it everywhere. People talk to other people in terms of how they're looking. Oh, you look great, you know, or or something like that. Or when the particular person isn't in the room, they'll feel very entitled to talk about how much weight they've put on and what they are and aren't doing about it, and how unhealthy it is. Which FYI, it may or may not be unhealthy, but it's nobody's business. And I think it's really worth examining why people think it's okay to comment on someone else's physical appearance. Because every single person has the right to exist in the world without having to be sexually attractive to the general public. Like it's not my job to be sexually attractive to the fucking gym bros that walk past me and judge me. It's it's not my job for them to be turned on my body. And if they aren't sexually turned on by my body, why do they get to have an opinion about it? Like a really um hard defined opinion about what I should and shouldn't be doing, what fat people should or shouldn't be doing. You don't owe strangers prettiness. You don't owe strangers thinness. You don't owe strangers youth. I'm sorry, that was my stomach that you just had. You don't owe strangers shaved outputs or shaved legs. You don't owe strangers ascetic compliance like you're a public garden being maintained by the council. I don't know if you can can you hear Lawrence? He's crunching. Halfway through the Rawhide, better keep going. I'm not sure I've said this or not, because I have recorded this a couple of times. I started a new house at Dangoa and Lawrence is what we in Australia call a campdog. So that means he grew up in the Outback, um, in a small community, probably. He does look like he's got a decent amount of dingo in him. Um but he's he does bark, and it's unusual for dingos to bark. Anyway, if you're not Australian, please don't panic about the dingo thing. We have a lot of weird national mythology around dingos, they're absolutely beautiful animals. Lawrence is domesticated, deeply opinionated and quite a bit suoky. Once the warhide disappears, though, there's a very strong possibility he's gonna jump onto this couch and personally object to me taking talking into my phone instead of focusing exclusively on him. So if you hear snorting, dramatic sighing, the sound of a medium-sized canine spiritually offended by me podcasting, that's what's happening. I I guess I want to say, look, and this is a really short episode, but I want to say perhaps do perhaps think about the way hear about the way other people talk about bodies and notice whether I do it too. You know, like I I do I'm not immune from being a hypocrite. There's no hypocrite pill. Um but it's something I try not to do. When I was married, my ex-husband and I had this rule that we would not comment on female women's bodies who were on the television. You know, like there's that I think it started at the Brownloom Medal, which is um if you're outside Australia, uh it's the awarded to the best and fairest player in Australian rules football. It's a big night, people get dressed up. Um, there's a lot of commentary on what the women look like. And I just got sick of it, you know, like I just got really sick of a very big part of the night being dedicated to what women looked like. I don't understand why. I r I do understand why. It's about commercialization, it's about selling airtime, and it's it is also about this kind of cultural obsession we've got with women's bodies, and that somehow it's okay for us to comment on them. It it's not okay. It it's really not okay. Because I think my hypothesis is you know that there's a lot of people are surprised that that the number of, you know, that sexual assault and sexual violence and rape. Let me just be clear that rape, sexual assault, and sexual violence are mainly overwhelmingly assaults and crimes committed by men against women. People are often surprised at the number and how high the rates of sexual violence are. I think it's one in three women in Australia report that they've been sexually assaulted. I wouldn't be surprised if that's higher. And if you I would say that every woman, every woman has been sexually harassed at some time in her life. That's why we choose the bear, by the way. And I I don't think we should be surpr I'm appalled, shocked, and outraged by that figure. But I'm not surprised because of the way men think it's okay to comment on women's bodies. They don't even think about it. Because of the and it's I I again I it fucking drains me to have to say not all men. Obviously. But men. The way that they comment on women's bodies without thinking about it says to me that they think they're entitled to the woman being sexually attracted, sexually attractive to them. I'm gonna say that in another way. If you have someone on Instagram, a a a man who is publicly shaming a woman, let's say a fat woman at the gym and saying things like she should just not eat as much and exercise more and she's not getting enough protein. Like, let's and you can't, by the way, you can go to Instagram and find that right now, immediately. Let's dissect why he's saying that. He's not actually interested in her health. Because if he was interested in her health, he would understand that one, being fat doesn't necessarily make you unhealthy, and two, public shame let's just say, let's just and this is a big hypothetical, but let's just say this young woman in particular did have high blood pressure and her weight contributed to that, and she had had robust medical advice that said losing weight would be helpful for her long-term health. Publicly shaming her on Instagram is not going to help her lose weight at all. In fact, it probably will have the opposite effect because shame is a reason lots of people overeat. So what is it really then that these people who comment on what women look like on fat, and not just fat women, I'm using fat women because we are an obvious target of ridicule ridicule. So what is that bloke actually saying? What he's saying without saying it is I don't find that woman attractive, so she should lose weight, so I find her attractive. I'm gonna say that again, it was really important. So what all of those posts are saying, and also comments, and if you're ever in a group and a man or a woman, a person comments on the physical appearance of somebody else, they're not trying to be funny, even though they'll say they are, they don't care about the other person's health. What they are saying underneath that veneer of oh, look at that person, look at how fat she is, they are actually doing one of two things. They're either or displaying their own insecurities, that's a big one, but the other thing that they are doing is saying, that woman is not sexually attractive to me, and that is a problem for me, and here's what she can do to fix it. And I believe it is because that discourse is so normal in our culture, it is so ingrained and it is so normal. So I don't believe, and I believe there's a direct correlation between that and sexual assault. If there's not, I'm happy to be proved wrong. But and of course there are many steps in between, but you get a particular sort of person you you can do the steps in your head, but you get a particular sort of person on a particular night when they've done particular things, coming across a woman who he insults because she's overweight, and that woman having a reaction that he doesn't like. You can see it, right? And I know it's not that simple, and actually it's much more complex than that, but I just wonder what would happen if it became very socially unacceptable to comment on other people's appearance in any way, including what people are eating. I'm interested in what you think about this, whether you think that I'm completely off track, um, whether you've experienced public shaming because of how you look, or even you know, in private when you're at a family event, um, and how you feel about it. I don't like going out in public. So not just to do with because I'm overweight, but I I don't like it. Um, I know that my family talk about my weight when I'm not in the room. Because the reason I know about this is because they talk about other family members when they're not in the room. Um I don't like the fact that people somehow have tied my worth as a person to my weight. That makes me feel really uncomfortable, and that makes me not trust that that person has my best interests at heart. Um yeah, and it's I'm I'm not alone in this, you know. It's as a fat person existing in society is an act of rebellion. It is an act of rebellion, and it's difficult. Um, you know, I believe there's a re-thinning of culture with the rise and the rise of GLP ones, and you know, like anytime you even try and have a conversation about it, people will say that you don't have a sense of humour, and it's exhausting. Like, number one, why do I need to have a sense of humour? Because you're being mean to me. Like, and number two, could you just not could you just get over yourself? Like, my body, your dick is not a divining rod. My body like my body is not some kind of water that your divining rod dick is seeking, and then gets upset because it hasn't found what it's looking for. I'm a human being, I'm allowed to exist. I'm a human being, I'm allowed to exist in my body, and I should be allowed to exist in my body without you having a fucking opinion about it. This is the C word, and I'm Catherine Redden. Thanks for listening. That uh sound off sounds really weird, but I'm going with it. I'm not re-recording because I really need to go and have a lie down. Bye!