True Colours

Get Your Frightbat On!

And the creativity continues! Get original Frightbat apparel here! Frightbat Van Badham has set up our very own Frightbat shop online, so we can wear our disdain for the patriarchy right out there, where Whatsisname Blair can be annoyed by it. All commission earned from the sale of these Frightbat goodies will be donated to Emily's List.

Frightbat Fightback Store - drape the whole family in colours and sizes to thrill.

Frightbat Gallery

It seems that Frightbats and their supporters are a very creative bunch! Check out some of these amazing images that have been unleashed on the Twitterverse in the past 48 hours. 





Reid Parker has created this dark and ominous image (left) of an emerging Frightbat, based on the imagery from the Batman movie series. I'm not sure which Frightbat it is, but I'm not gonna mess with her.














Still with the superhero theme, Christine Ewing played around with Batgirl and Wonderwoman and made this image (right) ours.

My definite favourite so far is the wonderful pic, created by fifteen year old Joel. He's learning all about feminism from his mother Deanne, from his sisters, and from Twitter.

The Frightbat Digest

In just a day, the word Frightbat has taken hold of the Australian consciousness...or at least the little part of it I inhabit. The concept of a reader poll to determine who is the Queen of the Crazies has been hijacked and reflected back at the conservative commentariat from which it came.

Crikey asks Who is Australia's craziest right-wing nutjob and mounts it's own poll  in a head-on attack against Tim Blair's piece from yesterday. It's simple, slick and to the point. 

Comedian and blogger Ben Pobjie deftly removes all doubt in his response to the bizarreness that is Tim Blair's columns. Like Crikey, Ben's blog "The Frightbat Epidemic" also features a poll, a surprising amount of custard, and an opportunity to vote for your favourite definition of frightbat, amongst other things.

And if you just can't make a choice between Messrs Jones, Bolt, Blair, Akerman, Kenny, Hadley for the title of Australia's Biggest Old White Bastard (and gawd, there's so many of them!), Junkee has you covered with a handy, illustrated shortlist. 


For the record, I'm choosing not to comment on Junkee funster Alex McKinnon's suggestion of jelly-wrestling as a suitable way to determine the craziest broad. In the winter dessert frightbat stakes, I'll stick with Ben Pobjie's custard for now.

And Twitter, of course, is gently burbling away with its #Frightbat hashtag, unleashing ideas and lobbing insults from on high. My favourite Frightbat tweet (so far) is below.

We Are All Frightbats Now

Be very worried, Tim Blair – we are all frightbats now

By Jenna Price, University of Technology, Sydney

I got the phone call about 6pm on Tuesday night.

“Mum,” said the voice. “Mum, are you OK?”

Turns out that one of my children had stumbled across a few sentences written by the Daily Telegraph blogger Tim Blair. He was big in the early years of blogging, what we’d call an early adopter; but not so much now. If he has a social media presence, it isn’t apparent. (This is his blog’s Twitter feed.)

Quite often, the target of his writing on his blog is women.

Smart women. Old women. Young women. In my case, it’s only been a few times. This year. But there are others: Van Badham, Clementine Ford, Marieke Hardy, Anne Summers. And on it goes.

These columns often include quite personal remarks. The way we look. The way we sound. Our clothes.
He has even decided to make comments about Badhams’s dead father – astonishingly he hasn’t been disciplined by the senior people at News for what are cruel and heartless comments.

The Tele didn’t let Alan Jones get away with the comments he made about the former Prime Minister’s father; but it looks like their own people can do it with impunity.

My child called with real concern for my feelings. Blair was running a poll which he imaginatively named: Crown Our Crazy Queen.

He wrote:

They shriek, they rage, they cheer, they despair, they exult, they scream, they laugh, they cry! There’s never a non-emotional moment in the lives of Australia’s left-wing ladies’ auxiliary, whose psychosocial behavioural disorders are becoming ever more dramatic following Tony Abbott’s election.

Uh oh, I thought as I read on. Surely Blair wasn’t about to start using mental illness to slur people with whom he disagreed.

Surely he was.

He went on:

Only one of them, however, can reign as our solitary monarch of madness. Only one can stand above all others, wailing and howling, while the rest look on and ask: “Where’s the Ritalin?” In the search for this nation’s most unhinged hysteric, let the BlairPoll decide!

Most unhinged? I love that word since Malcolm Turnbull reclaimed it. It must be wonderful cash for them as we click on the pages and the polls.

So who made the list? Anne Summers, Clementine Ford, Marieke Hardy, Catherine Deveny, Vanessa (Van) Badham, Margo Kingston, Clem Bastow, Jane Caro, Elizabeth Farrelly.

And me.

It’s an honourable list of women who’ve made a contribution to Australian life in one way or another – Anne Summers would be the most senior of all those women in the impact she’s had on public life.

What does it all mean? Not much if you just consider what Blair wrote. He was having a clickbait moment – and he must be loving the tens of thousands of votes cast in the poll.

But here’s what it really means. Tim Blair plays the man rather than addressing the real issues. He plays the woman (and women) because he thinks that will be easier to get away with. Of course, Blair is enabled by – and provided with – institutional power by his employer.

There are inventive ways to respond, of course. By last night, Clementine Ford had urged voters to pick her, pick her – and she’s the clear leader in the poll and an awesome woman! I discovered I wasn’t quite batty enough to take the lead. And there were thousands of tweets offering to take Blair on or report him to someplace.

So I decided to ask him myself about why he’d picked those particular women. I spoke to him on the telephone today.

“They were the most popular Twitter left-wing women,” he said. “People who take very public extreme positions, who swear a great deal, who are very abusive to our current prime minister."

When I asked him why he doesn’t write more about the budget or the economy, he told me that I was overanalysing the content of his blogs.(Of course, he also has the outlet of editorials for The Daily Telgraph to write on these topics, including his Kick This Mob Out campaign.)

I write about things that are of interest to me, it’s just an ad hoc thing on a day-to-day basis, there’s stuff there about cars, random, what’s amusing or interesting to me at the time.

And he tells me that a friend of his has forwarded on an email from a woman who is disgruntled about being left off the list:

Please tell your mate Tim that his failure to appoint me to his list of unstuck leftists is an act of curatorial negligence unmatched since Trotsky was refused a Nobel Prize.

I don’t think I know her name – but I have some comfort for her – and for my child. We are all frightbats now.


Jenna Price is a cofounder of feminist action group Destroy the Joint. She also knows and likes everyone on the frightbat list.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Mean Frightbat Girls

Yesterday, conservative commentator Tim Blair called them frightbats. Today, ex-Liberal Party doer Graham Young, writing for the Australian Financial Review, calls them Mean Girls. Who are these women, and why do they seem to attract this negativity from the right? 

This week’s Mean Frightbat Girls aren’t the same women who were destroying Alan Jones’s joint – they were politicians: Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore and former Victorian Police Commissioner Christine Nixon.

The Frightbats are exclusively journalists, bloggers and activists; they’re younger, and they’re feisty. They’re concerned with all sorts of “”progressive” issues, from feminism and equality to environment and science. In short, they embody a shopping list of characteristics generally distrusted by conservative men. They have both agenda and audience, and by all indications, that audience is growing.

In contrast to Tim Blair’s outing of the frightbats yesterday, Graham Young’s effort today contains no names. We’re just supposed to know who these mean girls are. Why, they’re the ones using social media to undermine our democracy of course. Surely they have some kind of neon marking on their foreheads or wear a special uniform or something?

Y’know, Twitter isn’t a private club, and those who have spent some time in and around the cesspit known as #auspol knows that there are conservatives as well as progressives in the pit, throwing their best 140-character grenades back and forth across the ether.

A quick glance at #auspol this morning suggests it’s an even fight, but the conservative tweeters have one major point of difference: they tend to tweet under pseudonyms more often than progressive tweeters. As I scroll through the last few hours of #auspol, I wonder who are the people  behind @AxeCo2Tax, @GeeForce77, @BigMiney, @LaborFAIL and @TipsySkunk.

In contrast, the Frightbats tweet under their own names: @JennaPrice, @JaneCaro, @vanbadham, @clementine_ford, @clembastow, @SummersAnne, @emfarrelly, @mariekehardy, @CatherineDeveny and @margokingston1. Of course, some progressive tweetsters do use a pseudonym, but none of them made Mr Blair's Frightbat Sorority. Is it this willingness to be open and accountable for their tweets one more factor that differentiates these women of calibre from political party hacks hiding behind fake accounts and trolling their #auspol opponents? 

Mr Young commented: 

"Polling we did during the last election showed social media was a news  source for the minority but they were two to three times more likely to be Greens or Labor voters than Liberal  ones. The corollary is Greens and Labor voters are far more numerous  on Twitter, and Twitter, as a collective, will be  on the left of the political spectrum."

This may or may not be true - he gives no source  for his conclusion. It is, however, a measure of the general distrust with which the conservative side of politics treats social media. LNP politicians are discouraged from indulging in Twitter, and when they do, it's often done with little understanding of how to use Twitter to advantage. Andrew Robb uses Twitter to distribute press releases, Joe Hockey drops in the occasional acerbic shot but disappears at the first sign of engagement, and Education Minister Christopher Pyne doesn't have a twitter account at all. Earlier this year, the Abbott Government spent millions of dollars on consultants to monitor social media with regard to immigration policies. 

Graham Young comments:

"Twitter should be a great connector. Instead it is a great divider. It is also a great undoer of "progressive" politics."

As he meanders through his thoughts on the evils of Twitter, he fails to see that Twitter is great at connecting people. Today's progressive politics - and many many other communities, political and otherwise - live large on social media, and it is from within this environment that action and activism flows into what Mr Young refers to as 'the yard'. 

Twitter is part of The Yard. It is just as real as any party boardroom, but far more accessible.

Enter the Frightbat

Today, one of News Corporation's conservative commentators, Tim Blair decided to round up a farrago of progressive female commentators, label them "unhinged hysterics" and poll his readership about which of these articulate women is Australia's craziest left-wing frightbat.

His blog post, entitled Crown Our Crazy Queen, went on to describe some of Australia's most respected female journalists, bloggers and activists in terms usually reserved for sleep-deprived, sugar-laden toddlers.

The results of his poll are irrelevant. It would be an honour to be nominated with this list of remarkable Australian women. Indeed, there has been some ferocious competition for the title. For the record, it looks as though Clementine Ford has the title securely in her spangly purse with just on 22% of the vote, although in fairness, she let it be known that she wanted the title.

Mr Blair's Honour Roll included these Frightbats:

• Clementine Ford
• Elizabeth Farrelly
• Marieke Hardy
• Catherine Deveny
• Vanessa Badham
• Margo Kingston
• Anne Summers
• Clem Bastow
• Jenna Price
• Jane Caro

Did he expect his targets, the left-wing ladies' auxiliary, to be cowed by his watery leak of testosterone-tinged ink? I seems to me that he may have annoyed a group who take this kind of gender-based goading a lot more seriously than he does.

I hope so.