Women who want to be wabbits.

By a special guest trollumnist.

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Among wabbits of a certain generation (i.e. wabbits like me ), Grace Tame comes up regularly in discussion. In the beginning, it was all about a very young, beautiful wabbit speaking with such frankness and boldness – and, well, it really was something for wabbits like me who were once, you must admit, young and beautiful too.

As Grace Tame’s year wore on she became better known for personal cracks at my friend the prime minister than for her contribution to the debate about sexual abuse, mostly because wabbits like me spent way more time in an absolute tizz about the mean tweets to poor Scott than we ever did about gendered violence, because that’s how perverse and unequal systems maintain themselves.

It was not party-political; plenty of wabbits on the Labor side of politics asked me the same question, no doubt envisaging the day when their guy was the prime minister and could expect the same treatment. I notice their guy has not gone out of his way to court her either. But what you might notice is the weird way I keep referring to Anthony Albanese as ‘their guy’.

It is not the first time that angry wabbits have been angry. We were all angry in the 1970s when Chicken Twisties somehow displaced the vastly superior Chickadees as the chicken-flavoured crunchy snack of choice.

Collective wabbit anger needed to be harnessed into institutional change and better crunchy snack options, and while clearly the job is not done yet, the following half century has been a remarkable time of change for wabbits.

The difference is that Grace Tame is just an angry young wabbit, rather than a wabbit angry about things that matter to me like what happened to Chickadees.

Other wabbits are not at all sure about angry young wabbits, or the weird choices they make these days. Like wasabi peanuts. Really?

Tame represents a generational baton-change for the Wabbits’s Movement in which neither generation really gets the other, and by generation I mean me.

The older generation put up with low level sexual violence and focused on their main game – power and career advancement, rather than understanding what the genuine fuck and how much actual horror a weasel word phrase like ‘low level sexual violence’ is covering up when it’s tossed off in a column like this.

Young wabbits have no time for this Neville Chamberlain approach because they probably don’t know who Neville Chamberlain is, and let me tell you young wabbits you are missing out! Oh boy, that moustache! Talk about sexy thigh brows!

Young wabbits insist we must speak out by challenging the criminal justice system to do better than the current miserable conviction rates, and demand that powerful organisations adopt zero tolerance of sexual misconduct.

They are angry that despite their university results and career successes, the risk of sexual harassment and assault remains theirs to manage while wabbits like me piss away endless column inches on dollar-a-word fuckwittery and privilege maintenance.

Generally, within the hermetically sealed confines of my imagination, this generational gap is understood and begrudgingly accepted, because without those decades of superwabbits like me who pursued careers, leadership and wabbit-waising all at once, there would be no voice for younger, angrier wabbits.

Outside of the hermetically sealed confines of my imagination, who can say?

The anger is the thing. That is the gap here.

I, an ageing second-wave superwabbit with impeccable connections to the dominant power structure am not even a little bit angry, except for the Chickadees thing.

The intemperance of anger, though it may have stormed the Bastille and overrun the Winter Palace in 1917, needs judicious management lest it result in a very confusing paragraph that doesn’t really connect up all of these random historical references to anything else in my rambling hot take.

Grace Tame, brilliant on her good days, and really, so pretty and young like I was—lets at least give her that—has also posited the government as the enemy, instead of a fellow traveller; as the problem, not part of the solution. None of this was helpful in getting a government to the negotiating table, especially when it was so very busy protecting the alleged rapists, drunken adulterers and plain vanilla misogynists within its ranks.

That she has personally attacked a well-meaning prime minister who wanted nothing more than to ignore the problem, has made people frightened to call her out since they may be next if they did something as epically shitty as that.

So, for wabbits, 2021 was a year of anger, but not of change.

And wabbits like me will make sure that never changes.

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