As I ate my Weet Bix this morning I read the following email sent by my sister in the United States.

Café charges men 18% 'gender tax' to highlight pay gap

This sign lays out of the policy at Handsome Her, a Melbourne, Australia café where men are invited to pay 18% more to reflect the gender pay gap.

A café in Melbourne, Australia, is giving its male customers a side of gender equity with their lattes. At Handsome Her, men are asked to pay an 18% premium to "reflect the gender pay gap." Men earn an average 17.7% more than women for full-time work in Australia, a government report found. The difference is roughly the same in the United States.

The café, which opened its doors for the first time Thursday, is hoping to shine a spotlight on the issue. "All we really wanted was to raise awareness and start conversations about the gender gap," Belle Ngien, the café's manager, told CNN. The voluntary donations are collected during one week every month and given to women's charities, Ngien said.

But it didn't take long for the Internet to go crazy over the scheme, with some calling Handsome Her's "gender tax" discriminatory. But Ngien is unfazed: "Men have their own spaces that we're not allowed in to, so why not have that space for women?"
No one has declined paying the extra 18%, she said. In fact, a few customers — men and women — have donated more. "Eighteen percent is actually not a lot. Our coffee is $4, and 18% of that is 72 cents," Ngien said.

Indeed, men have come from across town to support the cause, owner Alex O'Brien said in a Facebook post. "We've had men travel across town to visit us and pay 'the man tax' and throw some extra in the donation jar," O'Brien wrote, adding, "Guys, you're pretty neat."
In the end, Ngien said, no one is turned away based on whether they pay extra.

"Sometimes it's hard for people to change their minds," she said. "We're not in the business of changing people's minds. They are welcome to go elsewhere if they don't want to pay a voluntary donation."

So far, Handsome Her has collected a couple hundred dollars for Elizabeth Morgan House Aboriginal Women's Service. And it's definitely fueled a conversation.

No-one gets roused to passion while eating Weet Bix. I mused and meandered and then it came to me: none of  the internet responses refers to the beneficiary, an Aboriginal women’s service. No-one is less equal in this egalitarian land than a beaten Aboriginal woman.

I can affirm that: in my present posting I was asked to give evidence in the trial of the ex-partner who took to his girlfriend with baseball bat. He injured head, eye, limbs, trunk. Bones were broken. She was admitted unconscious to Intensive Care. A huge purple discoloration on the woman’s back, the size and shape of a bat, said clearly what she could not.

I forwarded the above to friends and family. A friend, Colin Hockley, wrote in response:

Once upon a time in a far away country lived a little boy. He had a big sister. 

The little boy's jobs were to feed the chooks and collect eggs, mow the lawns, work in the huge garden, chop the kindling wood, fetch coal, light the fire, walk the dog, get up in the cold, pre dawn and deliver newspapers before school, and deliver meat for a butcher on Saturday mornings. He worked on a farm through school holidays planting or picking potatoes, peas, Brussels sprouts, strawberries, raspberries, and was the chief shouter in a gang of rat catchers.  

At home his role was to peel the potatoes every day, lay the table for meals, wash dishes, and in summer, select salads from the garden. His best job was to roam across soggy fields early in the mornings, before even the farmer was up and about and find huge mushrooms laying amongst the cow poo.

The big sister cleaned house and the little boy helped with that. She also ironed, washed dishes and was very busy with homework from school. Big sisters got more pocket money because they "have to look after their hair". They don't do paper rounds in the dark, or butcher rounds, or work on a farm. This is for the boys. 

When the little boy grew up he sometimes found himself looking into an ugly pit of resentment at these differences and the bubble of pain that went with it, threatening to burst one day. Later he began to see that everyone carries weeping wounds or scar tissue and that he could transcend pain by looking at someone with greater pain. 

Like the story of the poor woman bashed with a baseball bat. 

A special tax of 18% on baseball bats should be imposed to pay for this atrocity.