Grace Tame has finally responded to her photo with Prime Minister Scott Morrison that had everyone in Australia talking.
The former Australian of the Year had a rather awkward moment with the PM, with a viral image of Tame not smiling beside Morrison going massively viral.
Morrison already had his say on the matter last week, saying that Tame had “had a terrible life” but that he would always greet guests with a smile.
Until now, Tame had kept quiet about what she thought about the interaction. In her first direct comment about it, she insisted that what she did “wasn’t an act of martyrdom in the gender wars.”
“The survival of abuse culture is dependent on submissive smiles and self-defeating surrenders,” she wrote on Twitter this morning. “It is dependent on hypocrisy.
My past is only relevant to the extent that I have seen – in fact I have worn – the consequences of civility for the sake of civility.”
In a follow-up tweet, Tame added: “What I did wasn’t an act of martyrdom in the gender culture war. It’s true that many women are sick of being told to smile, often by men, for the benefit of men. But it’s not just women who are conditioned to smile and conform to the visibly rotting status-quo. It’s all of us.”
Tame’s comments were immediately met with approval in the comments. “Honest, authentic and true. You are a game changer,” someone wrote. “You achieved more on that day than most could do in a career,” insisted another.
“Yes, civility is walking past what you can’t accept! Especially when it is being civil to someone who coldly and deliberately turned a blind eye to a sexual assault by one of his own employees and went out of his way to protect the assaulter and demonise the victim!” wrote someone else.
https://twitter.com/tamepunk/status/1488629182221656064?s=21
