Now when I say that it’s very difficult to write about certain topics because I’m a white male, it makes it sound like I don’t know how privileged I am… which, of course, is the point. I end up sounding like I’m mansplaining and that’s upsets just about everyone. Lots of men get upset because they don’t like the term and lots of women get upset because I sound like I’m being patronising.
(And for those of you who don’t know the etymology of the word “patronise” it means to talk down to someone like a father would. Interesting that “matronise” isn’t a word as far as spellcheck is concerned because every time I tried to write it, the computer helpfully changed it to “patronise”.)
Ok, having clearly stated my reservations about expressing my opinion on anything owing to the fact that I’m a privileged, white male and we don’t get to express our opinions on anything these days without someone oppressing us by pointing out that we may not actually be correct, I’m going to dip my toe into the water here and explain things in a clear, logical way that’s liable to upset enough people, just like all those Murdoch columnists who make their living by upsetting enough people that just about everyone reads them in order to disagree.
When a Bettina Arndt column first appeared in the 1980s, I read it and thought that it made some sort of sense. It talked about the difficulty of being a man at the time and, well, I was, and it was.
Don’t misunderstand, I don’t mean that it was easy to be a woman. I mean, I wasn’t, so I have no idea, but from what women were telling me, there were a lot of barriers to women doing just about anything and I agreed that nearly all of them were ridiculous and should be removed. In fact, I can’t think of any where I said, “No, that’s very important because if we let women do that, then it’ll just show how incompetent men have been all these years, so let’s make that a male only thing.”
By the 1980s, any male with an ounce of awareness knew that, when it came to relationships, it was no longer the case that the man needed to be in charge and that it was up to the woman to make her man happy. It was a far cry from the words of that 1963 song, “Wives and Lovers”:
“Hey, little girl
Comb your hair, fix your make-up
Soon he will open the door
Don’t think because
There’s a ring on your finger
You needn’t try anymore
For wives should always be lovers too
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you
I’m warning you
Day after day
There are girls at the office
And men will always be men
Don’t send him off with your hair still in curlers
You may not see him again”
But even if males had moved on from the sexism of earlier generations, people still weren’t happy with them and a new acronym SNAG, was applied to any male who was leaving the old stereotype behind. SNAG being Sensitive New Age Guy.
These males weren’t as popular as you might expect and to be called a SNAG wasn’t something that people generally aspired to… unless one was truly a SNAG, which is one of those paradoxes of human existence.
Anyway, the first couple of times I read Bettina, I thought, “Mm, this is it. Here’s a woman who understands that being a man in 80s is no bed of roses,” which immediately made me wonder about the term “bed of roses” which is not something that would be all that comfortable owing to the thorns…
Then she wrote something, and I thought, “This woman has no idea. Yes, it’s a hard being a man, but it’s not easy being a woman and while progress has been made in things like equal pay and we now have female pilots and female jockeys, there’s still a long way to go and… god, I am a SNAG… Damn you, Bettina, you’ve turned me into a figure of fun and I’ll never forgive you…”
Strangely my realisation that I’d developed empathy for the position of women didn’t seem to be noticeable to all the women in my life who tended to be more concerned about the mundane things like whether I’d done the dishes and vacuumed and the fact that I was developing a higher consciousness about the oppression of women seemed to have escaped them. By I guess that’s the thing: When it’s all said and done, women just are more practical than men.
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Bettina Arndt.
Back in the ‘seventies when she arrived on TV as some sort of prophet for sexual liberation, many sat back and thought, “a new, bright light has appeared in the firmament”.
Sadly, it has been nearly fifty years of decline…a sort of female Dorian Grey.
When can we accept that it is hard being human , whatever your gender , specially in a rapidly changing, climate threatened world ( ask a bee , a koala , its not just humans either ) ? And learn to cooperate with the others to ensure best possible lives for ALL ! Respect life , is a good starting point . Also learn that none of us is always right.
Can only agree with Paul Walter.
My friend says Arndt’s a dill while I say she’s a dangerous dill.
Unkind perhaps, but then there’s the empire-building, her spurious associations with rwnjs, and rabid public support for certified non-innocent people.
Was it fair to anyone, let alone men (however self-identified), to carve out a market niche in male advocacy, then monetise it?
Now her corner of the speaker circuit is a seething alt-right hotbed of misogyny, anti-feminism, and incoherent apologetics giving social work, psychology, and feminism a bad name.
Quite an achievement.
I know none of us is perfect Rossleigh, but I’d have been fine with you going straight for the jugular, SNAG or not! 🙂
Think Arndt qualifies for the ‘intellectual dark web’ of those who oppose identity politics, political correctness, and cancel culture in higher education and the news media within Western countries (Wiki).
Beyond the words are the powerful Anglosphere players in the background, of the right and (often fossil fuel) funding, obsessed about denigrating the centre, education, science and minorities, with a strong whiff of social Darwinism, Tanton and Koch Networks.
Also known as ‘Pinkerites’ https://www.mergatroyd.org/pinker/pinker_connections_version3.pdf
@Andrew Smith:
Looking fwd to clicking the link so I can feel even worse than I do now.
Suspect Arndt may qualify in spirit only however.
Don’t go to religious or lnp meetings much these days, Rossleigh, or you would know, they are most often found in front of bunnings and not with bettina, nor in churches, mosques, temples nor politics. Arndt’s recent support of Lehrmann and her comments on Hannah Clarke take her opinion from bullshit to disgusting enough to qualify her as a ‘Coventry dispatchee’. ps Loved your comment “have female pilots” “1910. March 8: Raymonde de Laroche of France becomes the world’s first woman to earn a pilot’s license. August 29: Marthe Niel of France becomes the world’s second woman to earn a pilot’s license. September 3: Hélène Dutrieu of Belgium is the first woman in the world to fly with a passenger.” However, I suggest that you watch “Spitfire Women” In addition to women only groups, the Nazis, the Poms and the Russians had women in both the army and airforce.
As I have played golf with a woman frontline soldier, I know we had Australian women soldiers.
Only the septics thought women incapable. Do they still???
ps
roses have no thorns and would make a sweet smelling and comfortable bed.
Arndt is calling for donations for Bruce Lehrmann, not to pay his legal fees but to provide him with accommodation and living expenses.
Lehrmann is in a Catch 22 in that his criminal trial was abandoned due to circumstances beyond his control so that he has not been found innocent or guilty he has not been acquitted or convicted.
Yet the civil defamation trial brought by Lehrmann found, in accordance with the civil standard that a rape probably occurred :
The civil balance of probability standard means that a court need only be satisfied an event occurred if the court considers that, on the evidence, the occurrence of the event was more likely than not to have occurred, unlike the criminal standard which would require substantially more evidence to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
The odd thing is that the civil trial was about defamation and not about whether a rape took place on that infamous night in parliament house.Yet it is the civil court that has ‘convicted’ Lehrmann.
I have no axe to grind for Lehrmann, who is now likely to be placed in bankruptcy for some years and suffer considerable damage to his career and reputation, but I can understand the fix that he is in and how the justice system has failed him.
In my view he can only receive justice if the public prosecutor in the ACT revives the criminal charge and subjects Lehrmann to a criminal trial.
Yes, indeed it goes on and on and on, the manipulation and politics of supremacy, envy, wrath and revolution.
Periodically reaching such sophistication that paradoxically, equity, ethics and fairness cannot be reconciled.
Is it not the nature of us that every time we consider a “Yes”, we also consider a “No”?
So every time we ‘take a stand’, there will inevitably be apprehension of bias.
And, there’s Newton’s third law; for every action (or force), there’s an equal and opposite action (or force).
It might stand to reason, but for the pursuit for perfection, whilst ok, believing one will arrive at it, indicates acceptance of no further potential and of death.
So I guess as time ticks on, so too will rants of the muses and their lineage. Hoorah!
Has Stokes abandonned Lehrmann?
Perhaps he could crash for a few days at his (ex?) missus’ sofa, but methinks it would be hot tongue and cold shoulder, ..
As for the rest, some good neat stuff from Frances, “a learned judge”.
And an interesting post, Terence Mills. Lehrmann has cornered himself in a cage full of people way out of his league.
Thing is, many feminists dont notice the debiltating side effects of manflu and the consequent retreat to the man shed or man cave,
where the flagon of plonk, cigarettes and stick books live.
paul walter
you can be forgiven for confusing your defamation backers in a crowded field.
Kerry Stokes is backing Ben Roberts-Smith.
What is slightly unusual is that Ten (the Defendants) did not seek security for costs : agreed in advance where there are reasonable concerns the plaintiff (Lehrmann) may not be able to pay the costs of the proceedings if the defendant prevails. Whilst the law will not impede the ability of a plaintiff to seek a remedy at law there is always the possibility – as was the case here – that the plaintiff having embarked on a costly action is unable to meet defendants costs when the action fails.
Frances: Informative link. Arndt is obvious, but there is a whole conga line inc. Alex Jones, Joe Rogan et al. and those more credible hitting the mainstream media etc., to create doubts about the centre, woke etc.; clear links to eugenics or social Darwinist and alt right movement, supported by usual wealthy donor suspects.
I’ll make it easier 🙂 website https://www.pinkerite.com/p/who-is-behind-pinkerite_25.html (link above & at bottom left of site shows funders & architects) includes ‘roll call’ from Bari Weiss when she spoke of the IDW in NYT some years ago, here’s some:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sam Harris, Alex Jones, Charlie Kirk, Claire Lehmann (Australian), Abby Martin, Stefan Molyneux, Charles Murray, Douglas Murray, Maajid Nawaz, Candace Owens, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Joe Rogan et al.
Yes, Terence, it boils down to that. Ruffians I tell you- all ruffians.
Here is the evidence that had me believe that Stokes was financing Lehrman, for his own purposes.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-04/lehrmann-defamation-network-ten-seven-network/103664948
Andrew: came here to thank you for the link to find your new post. I shall definitely plumb its dark depths with time and less mushbrain.
What a Pandora’s box! Pretty dismaying to note the preponderance of academic/non-academic psychs who’ve hitched their wagons to the ‘hereditarian’ junk tanks however loosely affiliated (can now see how Aunty Betty might fit in, given young Claire Lehmann’s delusional overreach).
The appallingly divisive notion of the ‘blank slate’ is a straw man I suspect. Certainly there was never an ‘either nature or nurture’ postulated during my undergrad studies in philosophy of science/psychology. The open view was of an empirical framework which sought at the very least to determine the contributions of both to an explanation of human behaviour.
It is my understanding that such explanation cannot be found in notions of an autonomous, cognitive, information-processing brain, which can only result in a circular representationism, the proliferation of competing but impotent models of ‘mind’ (useful only to Big Tech/AI etc), and to the slippery slide of attributing ‘difference’ to inherited intelligence which – arguably – can lead in its turn to the truly ruly dark web of eugenics.
I also wonder whether psych influencers’ drift to the right may not be somewhat due to the ascendancy in the US of cognitivism/post-cognitivism and its traditional rejection of unconscious processes (first theorised by Freud, who envisioned a “machine that would eventually go by itself”), which anyone who’s hesitated after banging the front door is all too familiar with (thus let in via the back door as ‘fringe consciousness’ by Hubert Dreyfus). Cognitivism has left a vast theory gap in psychology (poverty of theory), where all kinds of test tube counters and freewheeling influencers can find sympathetic refuge.
The limits of cognitivism is manifested occasionally in applied psychology. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) and its hybrids have been serendipitously favoured in this country by the privatisation of mental health services into whose partially-funded time-limited treatment parameters CBT has readily adapted. Whilst CBT treatment interventions can be effective and assist vast numbers of people to recover, it fails spectacularly in cases of serious disturbance where sufferers simply cannot access whatever it is that is at the core of their troubles, or where its normative aspects further alienate and confuse. The slack is then picked up (or not) by the corporatised and mainly useless helplines.
This alarming drift to the right by influencer-psychologists needs to be addressed. An ambivalent thank-you for pointing out the conga-line Andrew, much appreciated.
No problem Frances, my views are more succinct and mechanical (like the types via Koch’s who audited media messaging etc.) and other groups (inc Tanton/Koch crossover) it’s a long game (see MacLean ‘Democracy in Chains’) about trying to confuse and split the centre on soft issues, while disappearing the right/power and exposure to reason and criticism; if lucky nudges some to the right or not voting at all.
Like the Bannon, not new, the voter suppression strategy of publicly denigrating the centre and encouraging people of the centre, not to vote e.g. Clinton – Trump, Brexit – EU etc..
It’s very strategic….. another one to pay attention to, is UK’s Toby Young’s various (Koch/Tanton/Legatum linked) fronts FSU Free Speech Union and Daily Sceptic, (was formerly with Quillette too) etc. with opinion articles published in Koch linked ‘freedom of speech’ Spiked Online and Barclay’s Spectator, and worse…
The Guardian (2018): ‘UCL to investigate eugenics conference secretly held on campus. Toby Young was prominent attendee of last year’s conference run by an honorary senior lecturer at the London university’
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jan/10/ucl-to-investigate-secret-eugenics-conference-held-on-campus
Now Australia has its own new Free Speech Union based in Melbourne https://freespeechunion.au/aboutus.html
Chilling stuff, Andrew, thx again for posting.
That was chilling stuff.