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i have a few questions: on ethics, habit and the politics of likes
I would rather watch pornography—created ethically—with my family than scenes of violence. The order of the em dash has never been more important.
At twenty-six, I live at home with my family.
My family consists of a dog, two cats, my parents, and my two adult siblings. Our lives together, in the house, maintains the steady, tugging sense of time passing and also, simultaneously, of it having been stilled. The three kids each sleep in our childhood bedrooms, pull food from the same fridge we have for decades, sit on the couch at night with our parents when we are home at the same time and watch television together.
During the months that combined into years of state-wide lockdown, we chewed through a lot of television. Episode after episode, series after series, curled inside blankets through winter, strewn with the windows open and bowls of ice-cream in our laps during summer. The dog snored from his place on the couch. We assembled around him in positions we squabbled over until they became too established by routine.
It was a treasured time; familial bliss. We rarely went a night without observing a theatrical portrayal of intercourse.
It became comedic; my sister tried to keep a tally. The sequences—between characters of different ages, of different genders, of the same gender—ranged from implied or brief to extensive and detailed and explicitly impassioned.
After so much exposure, it might be assumed we would no longer find it discomfiting to witness actors performing sex with each other. Still, all these years later, my father groans when a scene of copulation begins. ‘Oh, come on now,’ he exclaims.
I am a passive and agreeable daughter. My mother does not accuse me almost every morning when the news is on of being pugnacious. As my father demurely turns his face away because characters on screen have started to discard their clothes, my tone is meek from the other corner of the couch: ‘Father, I did not see you squirm when [that woman’s body was found mutilated1] [that man was beaten by three other men] [there was a gun fight that left all characters dead]. Why are we more comfortable with violence than depictions of physical love?’
Q: Is it possible to be an Ethical Person™ who uses social media, casually, during a genocide?
A photograph of me, playing football. A photograph of me, standing with my team. A photograph of me, at a wedding. A photograph of me, at another wedding. A photograph of me, laughing with friends. A photograph of me, dressed up for my birthday. A photograph of me, in bathers. A photograph of me, holding gifted vegan protein bars, holding gifted kombucha, holding gifted period pain medication. A photograph of me, a photograph of me, a photograph of me.
Before Instagram introduced an algorithm, when posts were shown in the order of their publication, I averaged a 1,000 likes on my posts, often multiple thousands, even when they were ‘political’, especially when they were ‘political’. A record was over 500 organic likes in under fifteen minutes. I have had individual posts respectively accumulate up to 16,000 likes with more than 200,000 impressions; for an account with a modest number of followers, that is a fair few.
The type of content I post has remained consistent over a number of years but the algorithm, first introduced in 20162, continues to fluctuate. It has not been more apparent than now, when my posts about Palestine sometimes get a total of 40 likes in six hours, contrasted to other posts which usually have at least 300 by the same time. Stories about Palestine will be lucky to crack 100 views, despite other stories usually being closer to 900. When engagement drops, my follower count does too: the number of new followers coming in usually balancing the number leaving becomes incommensurate.
Q: Is it possible to be both an Ethical Person™ and a cANny sOciAl MeDia uSer?
A list of further questions (also with no answers so far) (open to them) that revolve around my brain every single day:
How could it be moral for me to be on social media, have access to information about the atrocities our country is complicit in, and post anything other than that? But if I only post and repost that ‘content’, and nobody is shown it due to the algorithm, is it ultimately doing anything? Is it smarter, then, as a professional athlete, to try to expand my platform and develop an audience and ultimately grow a brand—that maintains its core impetus of collective justice—by simultaneously posting images of myself, and sport, and topics deemed more commercial, that inarguably get more traction and support, if it means those other posts are seen? If it incidentally fosters exposure to issues that actually matter? Or is that just an attempt at justifying self-obsession? How can I share poetry by Palestinian writers about family units—small, entire universes—being wiped out, alongside photographs of me playing football? How can I promote a gifted package from an active wear company straight after reposting an article about the disproportionate incarceration of Aboriginal children? Is posting something better than posting nothing at all? Is that just what people who are not doing enough tell themselves to satiate their conscience? Is me curating a strange, dystopian balance between meme and advocacy clever, or is it cheap and deeply insensitive? Is providing a type of politics that is relatively gentle, not too ‘offensive’ or ‘controversial’ or ‘confrontational’, a resourceful way to increase awareness around important causes? Does it allow the conversations to be more palatable? Should any of these conversations even be palatable? But if they’re not, do people listen? Do I have a responsibility, or an opportunity—with certain privileges afforded to me by skin colour, neutral religion3, middle-class background—to appeal to, or at least be tolerated by, certain demographics that can then allow the absorption of more radical4 ideas? Is it weak to not rebel fully against expectations of cordiality and ‘femininity’ and aesthetic? Or is it unnecessarily truculent to reject potential commerciality and, as a consequence, possibly reduce the chance specific types of people will listen to me? Is it helpful to be appealing—whatever that means—and bridge the gap between those who do not understand, make them comfortable enough to be challenged, sufficiently soften the lessons to allow them to participate, or is it cowardly? Is it a blatant display of entitlement to strive for my ‘activism’ to be nice enough to be consumed? Is it me trying to remain liked when others—true activists—rarely get the luxury? Can that be rectified if I do not claim the label of activist and instead redirect any praise, any gratitude, back to where it should be focused, back to those who do the most labour in these spaces but rarely receive adequate recognition, who are the greatest catalysers of change and are uniquely demonised in combined forms of oppression for it, being predominantly women of colour? Would that be me still inadvertently benefiting from a rigged system, or successfully using the system against itself? Would I just be exploiting my privilege to maintain my own comfort? Is it possible to ethically exploit privilege to be a more effective advocate? Can multiple things be true at once?
The stringent impulse I feel, deep in my body, against injustice conflicts with my conciliatory nature.
I so desperately want to be firm and angry and passionate and gracious and polite and kind. One of my strongest values, and greatest loves, is diplomacy. It is the nexus of any interpersonal interaction I have. But what a luxury to believe in it, to cherish it. How naïve, how disingenuous, to use the same word on a larger, more official scale, when others can tell you through their lived experiences diplomacy does not work; how diplomacy, in current and past contexts, is ultimately a scam. It cannot be divorced from world history: the lies, the deceptions, the abuses of power, the coverups. Diplomacy is often code for increasing and maintaining control. When there are bullies, they are not trying to give you rights or safety or freedom, they are trying to make money, and they will destroy you if they think it could be beneficial. One only needs to look at the 49 times the US used veto power against United Nations resolutions on Israel5 to see diplomacy, even in the UN itself, is merely a profitable illusion.
Us, being the goodies, as ‘Australia’, is also an illusion. We are not the goodies. We are not valorous. We do not give everyone a fair go. We do not stick it to authority. There is nothing larrikin or heroic about our national identity. We are Israel’s ally. We are America’s ally. Their decisions are just as much our responsibility. Their acts are in our name. Their bombing of children will be on our conscience, our country’s conscience, forever. It stains us. It is our legacy too. We support them. Not even two months ago—more than a year into Israel’s destruction of Gaza—we were still exporting weapons to Israel6. In the international forum, we verbally condemn, and urge for peace, but do nothing tangible, nothing brave enough to signal genuine dissent.
Q: How much time does it take to make a difference?
2 minutes: I have two minutes that I can spare for advocacy for Palestine.
2 hours: I have two hours that I can spare for advocacy for Palestine.
2 weeks: I can work on advocacy for Palestine over the next two weeks.
The running joke in my family is I cannot watch anything scary.
It was the term I used when I was younger, before I had more specific language to describe what I was trying to avoid. Scary is cruelty. Scary is sitting on the couch, eating food, whilst watching others experience terror. Scary is watching them get hurt and not doing anything about it.
‘You know it’s not real,’ my family love to say. ‘It’s not actually happening.’
When it comes to agreeing on a new television series for us to watch, or a film, I am an inconvenience. The four of them have similar tastes: fast-paced, clean dialogue, tight plot, distinct characters. I narrow the field of options further with two requisites: I would like a woman to speak more than she is spoken about, and I would like to avoid excessive violence. My parents and siblings roll their eyes at me, because our meanings for excessive are different, mainly because they define it as anything over about five scenes, and mine is anything more than zero.
I would rather watch pornography—created ethically—with my family than scenes of violence. How can sex possibly be more gross than humans hurting each other? Sex, even at its most primal, maybe especially, is still a physical expression of desire, an enactment of passion, affection, of love. It seems perverse that society seems to deem violence less repugnant for children to view and discuss than sexuality.
Family Television
Violence in all
episodes—we shudder at
any scene of sex.
‘We can’t watch that because of Saraid,’ is the familiar phrase, said approximately once each by the four of them during the taut procedure that is movie selection.
Its delivery, determined by the length of time the procedure has already taken, starts at indulgent exasperation and moves steadily towards rising frustration up to the summit of irritation.
I routinely offer to leave. I would prefer to leave: head to bed to read or sleep. But that is not an option. My family do not want me to be left out. So, I try. I consistently try, despite knowing it is not something I will outgrow. My maximum threshold of ‘scary’ scenes varies depending on the intensity—graded by the extent of torture, power imbalance between characters, pain, betrayal, and sadism—so often even one scene is enough. It is already far too much. My body reacts involuntarily against it. I cannot control this reaction: the sudden roiling nausea, the inhibited breath, the grief. It is coating, viscous.
It’s not real. It’s not actually happening.
I know. And yet. And yet. And yet it feels like it is.
I have played the role of inconvenience for at least a decade. It is tiring, so I regularly allow myself to be cajoled into watching a film because, as my family have all learnt to say, it contains a ‘strong female protagonist’7—and to watch a film where a woman character has agency and is also not subjected to abuse is too much to expect. My family act surprised when, two hours, one hour, eleven minutes, into a film they have promised will be fine, I hurry from the room, trying not to sob.
‘It’s unrealistic,’ my brother said once, ‘to not be able to watch any show that has normal stuff in it.’
I want to shriek at him, ‘I watch the news, don’t I? Why do any of us want to seek more of that out?’
Q: Is there a way to live ethically when there are atrocities occurring in our name?
I remember when I was at school, my classmates and I were equally horrified and bemused by the Holocaust—the horrors Nazi Germany committed against the Jewish people. We could not understand how the rest of the world stood by as it happened. We would never have been like that. We would have done something.
Now, as an adult, I can understand without understanding. It is as simple and as complex as our media reporting on the current genocide in Gaza as an equal conflict, a war; describing anyone who stands against humanitarian aid being purposefully blocked, again and again and again, from reaching civilians not as being naturally, morally, objectively, Anti-Genocide protesters, but as being Pro-Palestine—which, though obviously technically true, has been twisted into conflation with antisemitism.
I was lucky enough to be taught media literacy in high school. Using Language to Persuade, the subject was called. We mostly studied articles: opinion pieces, columns, news pieces. It was all about critiquing how the author was encouraging us to feel, then attempting through this to ascertain their intentions, allow it to balance our first instinct of everything we read and consume being objective truth. It simultaneously empowered and disillusioned me.
I have grown up believing in a universal sense of justice. The sense transcends an expectation of consequences, or wrath. It is closer to an omnipresent collective integrity, invisible but inviolable. I attribute this feeling almost singularly to my Whiteness. I think the majority of White people—although the generalisation is invariably impacted by factors such as sexuality and gender expression and class and socioeconomic status—move through the world, since we were born, since we were really little, thinking there is a pervading fairness, a safety.
We are taught if you’re a good person, if you do good things, if you are ever the victim, you will be looked after. If I have my house robbed or if I’m attacked on the street, if I am distressed, I can call out to anybody, I can call the police, and I will be helped. On a larger scale, if somebody—or a force of somebodies—came into my home, said my home was now their home, started murdering my family members, all of my friends, my neighbours, my teammates, my teachers, my nurses and doctors and surgeons, everybody in my community, other countries would intervene.
They would say, ‘Oh my goodness, poor Australia. This is wrong. This is such an injustice. Someone do something! We’ll do something.’ And, in this hypothetical in my mind, it would, very much immediately, stop.
But the reality is that is not true. It was not true when Britain began and continued its genocidal project against First Nations peoples on this continent: brutally dispossessing locals of their homes, their lands and waters, their cultures and languages and sciences, their freedoms, their loved ones.
And even if it was true for me, in 2025, it would likely only be because of my certain demographic, because of who I know, or am connected to, who sees themselves in my plight, who would benefit from helping me, as opposed to any form of authentic international altruism.
The above quote is from a TikTok video I filmed almost exactly a year ago but have never posted. It was in response to Rosy Pirani’s tweet, who in turn was responding to the controversy of Ryan Gosling being nominated for an Oscar for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, but not Margot Robbie8:
I said the entire situation was interesting to me because I felt it illustrated those who could not, or choose not to, hold different versions of reality, of existence, in their own mind.
The critique, I thought, around the nominations was valid. It was still an important dialogue. But it also exposed hypocrisies. It bared the fragility of a particular expression of feminism. It was easier to talk about Oscar nominations than what is happening in a place like Gaza.
And the only reason people who think of themselves as feminists—who are probably kind and intelligent and passionate people who care about equality—are having the conversation about movie awards but not other really important, urgent issues, like Palestine, is because a very small, insidious part of them, of ourselves, thinks it is happening to those people all the way over there.
And there is a reason that it is happening.
It must be complicated.
They must have done something to deserve it.
Because if we comprehend that is not true, and that these people are victims, just like we would be victims if the situation was reversed, it throws into question everything we have ever known about the world and, as an extension, ourselves. And it makes us feel unsafe.
There is too much deliberately-inflicted pain in this world for my childlike faith in fairness to not have been steadily corroded, but the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by Israel—our ally—has, at twenty-six, finally conquered it. There is no true fairness. There is no justice. There is only the people, united, resisting, trying to fight the arbitrary decimation of one another.
Q: If I put links to support Palestine under every piece I publish, will I allow myself to share my writing?
There is an attitude—alternately cynical or idealistic—that life has to go on. Humans have been hurting each other since the dawn of time, since man(!) began, since forever. Suffering is nothing new. It is just the way it goes. Unfortunately, humans can be cruel. The best thing we can do, as humans who are not cruel and obviously sympathise for those suffering at the hands of the ones who are, is go about our lives, fully living, for them! We need to live with joy and freedom because they can’t, etc.
But that rhetoric seems like it should only be said by the people actually experiencing the suffering—not the ones looking on from a secure distance. It otherwise feels like a neat excuse out of consistent, actionable, uncomfortable empathy. In other words: any emotion that helps actually force change.
I have struggled to write this article because of the conflicting images: my family in our living room, and the genocide in Gaza. But these two realities do exist together. Denying them, trying to only exist in one, does not help either. It means people turn away. They choose the easier option. They fixate on award nominations. We have to be brave enough to grapple with the fact this all can occur at the same time, in the same world.
For the majority of the past year, I have struggled to make any art at all. I am supposed to be an artist. I am supposed to be creating. I am supposed to be writing a novel. I am supposed to be publishing an essay on this platform every week. I am supposed to be posting on social media so the tiny platform I have been trying to build since I was fifteen does not topple. But none of it seems important. It seems, frankly, ludicrous.
This is a subscription platform. I have generous people paying me to write. Because of this, throughout 2024, I continued to promise that pieces like the turning or the second part of body of work were being published soon—and I meant it. I have done the work on them, they are finished.
But what an immoral farce to share an essay about love and basketball when over 400 athletes, including 84 child footballers,9 have been killed in Gaza by Israel. When Israeli forces have destroyed at least 34 sports facilities, stadiums and gyms.10 When football fields have been repurposed as makeshift cemeteries. How incomprehensible to promote work about professional sportswomen who are parents whilst Palestinian mothers are forced to give birth, have caesarians, without access to anaesthetic.11 How inconsequential any sentence that forms from my fingertips is in comparison to those new babies freezing to death,12 to the paramedics13 and journalists14 being deliberately targeted and killed in their ambulance vehicles and news vans, to the novelists being murdered in airstrikes on refugee camps,15 to the doctors being kidnapped from besieged hospitals16 and raped to death,17 by an ally to our own country.
These are not details you read and then forget about. These are not details you ignore. They are details that compel you to action. Find two minutes. If nothing else, imagine they are somebody you love. But remember: you do not have to know somebody to love them.
As a writer who is neither Palestinian nor an anti-Zionist Jewish person, my voice is not necessary in the conversation.
But as this conversation—one that interrogates and holds to account an occupying force’s abhorrent, consistent breaches of human rights—is arguably the only necessary one to be having right now, it feels like my voice is not necessary at all.
Some might argue humanity’s pain is felt by everyone and, while I fundamentally agree, that sweet sentiment is usually espoused by somebody who is divorced from the reality of literal, inherited, experienced trauma. It is not my pain. It does not belong to me. It is not a vague concept that we can discuss in abstract terms, as if collectively sharing the burden. Objectively, any grief I feel could not equal a fraction of emotion woven into the legacy that is Palestinian resistance. It is therefore, obviously, not my space to take up. There are innumerable courageous and talented Palestinian writers whose work should be centred. They have made enough art, created enough educational resources, provided enough perspectives, shared enough testimony, and they deserve our witness.
There has ultimately been no need to create my own work. There has been no meaning in it. All forms of art might be valuable, and diverse perspectives are always important, but there is still a hierarchy of value. The world needs truth. The world needs justice. It needs to hear the voices that continue to be marginalised and misrepresented, if presented at all, in the media.
Silence is easy. Comfortable. Safe. It protects careers. Maintains the systems and structures that embolden and enable this genocide.
I am not "pro-Palestinian" as the media have reported. I AM Palestinian. Silence is not an option. I refuse it. I refuse.
Instead of writing last year, it has felt like all I could, all I should do, is amplify, which has lead to shadow-banned accounts, which has lead to the initial question in this essay:
Q: Is it possible to be an Ethical Person™ who uses social media, casually, during a genocide?
A: Who do you expect to answer that? Meta?
A few more questions (as yet also unanswered):
Is it possible to be an ethical person who uses social media both intentionally and casually? Is it possible to be an ethical person at all? What is the delineation in moral value between intention and impact? If I worry a lot does that count for anything? Is that just a weird form of self-pity if it inhibits me? But what does it mean to be inhibited? What is life without empathy? And how does anything change without it? Can empathy even exist without a substantial amount of pain? How much pain is manageable? Maintainable? Ethical? When does it teeter into a saviour complex? Or simply self-sacrificial? Is the answer we just try our hardest? But who is to say whether that hardest is enough? What happens if somebody is merely rationalising themselves out of discomfort, influenced by their level of privilege? But how can we truly know the capacity of those around us? How can we demand more from them if we have never been in their exact situation, lived all their experiences, made all their choices? But if we do not demand more how will anything get better? But if we are not sustainable with our intensity of care how can we continue to continue? Can the only answer be, then, that we endeavour to do our absolute best to help those around us, to make the world a more loving place, and be honest with ourselves about what that best is?
I promise to write more this year. I promise, equally, to actually let you read it. There is truly so much I am working on. I send my love to any and all of you reading this, over this period of new year, and request it be passed on. I leave you with this poem by poet and novelist Omar Sakr:
Does every crime show centre around a woman’s dead and tortured body? For the love of all things good, write something else.
(Meaning nothing specific: maybe agnostic, maybe atheist, maybe spiritual, maybe anything, maybe nothing)
Everybody deserves safety, access to healthcare, food, housing, education, etc
See above: a woman speaks
Of those killed, 297 were footballers, including 84 children who harboured dreams of playing for Palestine. A statistic calculated as of August, 2024 — five months ago.
From October 7, 2023, to December 25, 2024, at least 217 journalists and media workers had been killed in Gaza. Five more were killed on December 26 when an Israeli air strike targeted a news van near al-Awda Hospital.
Hundreds of Palestinian doctors have disappeared into Israeli detention.
UN expert shocked by death of another Palestinian doctor in Israeli detention.
Israeli forces have arbitrarily detained Palestinian healthcare workers in Gaza since hostilities began in October 2023, deported them to detention facilities in Israel, and allegedly tortured and ill-treated them, Human Rights Watch said today. The detention of healthcare workers in the context of the Israeli military’s repeated attacks on hospitals in Gaza has contributed to the catastrophic degradation of the besieged territory’s healthcare system.
New details have emerged in the case of the Palestinian surgeon, considered one of Gaza’s most prominent doctors, who was tortured to death and sexually abused by Israeli forces.
So many thought provoking issues and truths in this article.