This story was originally published on The Spinoff.
Rachel Lang was listening to National Radio in the shower one morning in 2003 when a news report came over the airwaves that left her stunned. It revealed that the median income for women in Aotearoa was just over $14,000 a year, a figure so depressingly low that she found it hard to believe.
It was also just one more shocking story in a string of strange headlines that had captured Lang’s attention. Whether it was a police officer who became engaged to a pornographer or a Christchurch man selling penis-expanding cream on the internet, it seemed to Lang that the world had turned upside down. Suddenly, anything was possible, everyone wanted their five minutes of fame, and the gap between legality and morality felt wider than ever before.
