CALLING WOMEN’S BREASTS “bangers” is a new one on me, but it seems to have passed the official Aussie acceptability test and joined the lexicon. Fashion boy Gok Wan used the term in an advert on Australian tv and provoked a no-doubt lucrative spat for his employers in the media. Feminists raged and the non-gay-loving drongos obligingly chipped in with jibes about poofters.
So serious was it all that the Advertising Standards Bureau were called in to pass judgment. To their immense credit they adhered to the Australian tradition of plain-talking and basically said get a grip on yourselves, because bangers “is not inappropriate and not strong or obscene language in this context”.
I’m still not sure whether bangers refers to the meatiness of breasts or something else — any more than whether “bazookas” refers to the devastation they can wreak on the febrile psyche of a heteronormative male or not. Since the term is clearly not of Mr Wan’s own choosing but that of a bunch of advertising charlies (isn’t that another term for bazookas?) I suspect it’s something dreamt up in a moment of creative hysteria induced by approaching deadlines and too much coffee. It’s more intriguing than “assets”, another word used in the ad and which has annoyed the feminists just as much, even though no honest woman would deny that a good pair of assets is as powerful as a pair of bazookas in the perpetual war of the sexes.
IT’S NOT JUST Target, the company who commissioned the ad, who’re benefitting from the publicity: Australian comedienne, Catherine Deveny, has come to Wan’s defence and got a spot for herself in the Guardian:
I’m on Team Gok and I’m going in swinging for him. Because any British-Chinese gay man who gets up people’s noses for calling breasts “bangers” is my kind of guy – especially when the complaints received were so dimwitted.
But before you get confused about the idea of liberal performer standing up for sexist language in an organ of righteousness such as the Guardian, just take note. Deveny’s all for Wan because he’s British-Chinese (ie, ethnic) and gay. On the Liberal Victim Scale that gives him two points and a free pass. I can’t see Deveny letting an Anglo heterosexual get away with it.
If you need further evidence, I suggest you watch her contribution to a debate (“Freedom of speech is over-rated”) at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne (available on YouTube). According to Deveny all the right people — ie, women, gays, the non-white, etc — don’t have enough free speech, while all the wrong people — ie, whites, men (especially middle-aged ones, for some reason), the religious and people working in corporations — have too much. You know the script, either because you’re sick of hearing it for the thousandth time, or perhaps because you’re still delivering it yourself. I get the feeling that Deveney’s desire would not be to extend such freedom to everyone but just to flip the status quo.
Irony is half-brother to hypocrisy, however, and as a white, middle-class, heterosexual woman, Deveny doesn’t seem to be short of the ability to speak freely herself and capitalise on it. I’ve watched some clips of her performances: they’re not lacking free speech and the giving of offence, just humour. I’d rather watch Gok Wan squeezing women’s bangers any day.
