He Rated Her Looks. What A Dick

Coco Pickering, 22, working at Commonwealth Bank has apparently become the subject of a LinkedIn post calling her “beautiful”. And now corporate Australia is arguing about it, because a young woman should be able to go to work without a man publicly assessing her appearance.

LinkedIn is meant to be a professional platform. People use it to talk about jobs, skills, promotions and the occasional leadership lesson discovered while making toast. Yet somehow this man looked at a young bank worker and decided the professional contribution he had to make was a comment on her looks.

Perhaps he thought he was being nice. That’s often the excuse, isn’t it? It was a compliment. But a compliment is usually for the person receiving it. A public post about a woman’s appearance invites everyone else to look at her through his eyes. She didn’t go to work to become content for his LinkedIn audience.

I’m sure she has a job to do and ambitions of her own. None of those appears in the headline. What does appear is her age, where she works and a man’s opinion of her face. That’s a fairly neat demonstration of the problem.

And before someone says we can’t say anything nice anymore: yes, we can. Tell a colleague she handled a difficult customer well. Praise her work. Thank her for helping you. There are hundreds of pleasant things to say about a woman at work that don’t sound like you’ve wandered in from a dating app.

The man may be surprised by the reaction. I’m more surprised that he pressed post without once thinking, “Would I write this about a 22-year-old male bank worker?”

Probably not. Which tells us exactly how professional the post was.

Good for her! What a sleazy old pig.

Grand Final...

Yesterday I didn't get to blog. Normally, I wouldn't have.  But yesterday, it was the AFL Grand Final.

It wasn't overly exciting... Well, I guess it was if you consider the score. Brisbane won by a goal; or there abouts. But they won with about 2 minutes on the clock. It was a fantastic game.

Still, last year at least we had a Victorian club playing in it. Geelong. But that wasn't overly exciting either. It was my team, and we lost.

I have been to 5 losing and 4 winning grand finals.

I'll admit; winning is better.

Why Can’t They Just Let Her Leave?

A woman decides she has had enough. Perhaps she says it aloud. Perhaps she quietly starts putting money aside, looking for somewhere to live, imagining a future in which she can shut her own front door and breathe.

And sometimes, the man who claims to love her decides she isn't allowed to have that future.

Why can’t he just let her go? It is such a simple question. People separate every day. It hurts. They argue over the house, the dog and whose turn it is to explain things to the children. Then, somehow, they carry on. Yet some men would rather kill their partner than accept that she has a life beyond them.

In Australia, 32 women were killed by a current or former intimate partner in 2024–25. That is about one woman every 11 days. By 19 September this year, a separate public tally had recorded 51 women killed by violence in 2026. Those 51 deaths are not all partner killings, and we should never blur the numbers to make a point. The real figures are dreadful enough.

I keep coming back to the word love. We use it in headlines about these deaths as though it explains something. He loved her too much. He couldn’t bear to lose her. He was devastated when she left. But a woman is not a possession someone has lost. She is a person who made a decision.

For some violent men, that decision means a loss of control. The threats, the checking of her phone, the rules about where she goes and whom she sees may have been there long before she tried to leave. Violence is more common where a man believes he owns his partner or has the right to make her decisions.

Then we tell women to leave, as if walking out is the end of the danger. Of course, women should be able to leave. They should also be able to survive doing it. A man who threatens to kill his partner needs to be taken seriously while she is still alive to be protected.

And the rest of us have a part in this. When a mate talks about his ex as though she owes him her time, her location or another chance, don’t laugh along. When he calls constant surveillance “caring”, say what it is. When a woman says she is frightened, believe her before her photograph appears beneath a headline.

I don’t want another solemn announcement that “something must be done” after another woman has died. I want her to be able to pack a bag, walk away and get on with the ordinary business of living.

Why can’t they just let her be?  :( 

The Left-Wing Radicals Have Left the Building

Two delegations walked out during Donald Trump’s speech at the United Nations: Iran’s and Cuba’s. Which is quite a feat, really. Most people who find Trump unbearable can turn off the television. These people had to get up, gather their papers and leave while the cameras were rolling.

Trump’s speech covered Iran, Cuba, drug cartels and his familiar warning that communism must never reach America. Iran’s delegation walked out as he spoke about military strikes against their country; Cuba’s left during his remarks about its government. Calling them all “left-wing radicals” makes a wonderfully punchy headline, but it does rather flatten the detail. Iran and Cuba were protesting different things.

I’m not going to pretend I’d enjoy being trapped in a room listening to Trump for 37 minutes. He can turn a speech about world affairs into something that sounds like a man arguing with every country at a very large family Christmas. But I do wonder what a walkout achieves, apart from giving him a fresh audience reaction to talk about.

Then again, staying seated and looking furious would have given the cameras something too. Perhaps that’s the problem with a Trump speech: whatever you do, you’re part of the show. The only person guaranteed to enjoy the spectacle is Trump.

Killed By Someone Who Was Supposed to Love Her...

Another three women are dead.

And, once again, the person accused of killing her is not some stranger lurking in a dark alley. It is someone she knew. Someone she trusted. Someone who may once have told her that he loved her.

How does love become this?

It doesn’t, of course. Because this isn’t love. It is ownership dressed up as love. It is jealousy passed off as passion. It is control disguised as concern.

Where are you going? Who are you talking to? Why are you wearing that? Why didn’t you answer your phone?

At first, it can almost sound flattering. He wants to know where she is because he worries about her. He doesn’t like her friends because they are a bad influence. He controls the money because he is “better with it.” He checks her phone because he has been hurt before.

Slowly, her life becomes smaller while his control becomes bigger.

Then, if she tries to leave, the danger can escalate. She is no longer obeying. She is no longer his to supervise. And for a man who believes love means ownership, her independence feels like humiliation.

That is one of the ugliest answers to the question: why are so many women killed by people who are supposed to love them?

Because some men have never learned that a woman is a person, not a possession. She is allowed to leave. She is allowed to fall out of love. She is allowed to make decisions he doesn’t like. She is allowed to live a life that does not include him.

On average, one Australian woman is killed every nine days by a current or former partner. Worldwide, an estimated 51,100 women and girls were killed by partners or family members in 2023. For many women, the most dangerous place is not the street. It is their own home.

And we still ask why she stayed.

Why didn’t she leave earlier? Why did she go back? Why didn’t she report him? Why didn’t she see what he was capable of?

Perhaps she did.

Perhaps she knew exactly what he was capable of - and that was why she was terrified to leave.

Leaving may mean having nowhere to live, no money, frightened children and a partner who has threatened to kill her, himself, the children or the family pet. It may mean being stalked, tracked through her phone, harassed at work or dragged through endless court proceedings. A piece of paper saying he must stay away is useful only if he decides to obey it - or someone stops him when he doesn’t.

Meanwhile, women are told to change their behaviour. Don’t walk alone. Don’t drink too much. Don’t date the wrong man. Keep evidence. Pack an emergency bag. Change your passwords. Turn off location tracking. Tell a friend. Have an escape plan.

Women are expected to become full-time security experts while the violent man continues doing exactly as he pleases.

We need to stop treating these killings as inexplicable explosions from otherwise loving men. In many cases, the murder is the end of a long history of coercion, threats, stalking, intimidation and violence. The signs were there. The woman may have reported them. Her family may have seen them. Police, courts or support services may have known about them.

Then she is killed and everyone says, “Nobody could have imagined this.”

Women imagined it. They were simply not believed strongly enough.

This is not about claiming that every man is violent. Most men are not. It is about recognising that most violence against women is committed by men, and that silence helps the violent ones hide among the decent ones.

Good men need to be part of this conversation too. They need to challenge the mate who talks about his ex as though she deserves punishment. They need to stop laughing at jokes about controlling women. They need to teach boys that rejection is painful, not fatal; that jealousy is not love; and that losing a relationship does not mean losing ownership—because ownership should never have existed in the first place.

A woman should not need a carefully planned escape route from someone who once promised to love her.

She should not have to die before we finally believe she was in danger.

And we should stop calling it love when what we really mean is control.

I don't know about you, but the land of Secretwomen.org is looking good!!