Janet Albrechtsen, men hating feminists, hairy arm pit feminists, and more tough love from a supercilious perch

(Above: Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm being forced to deal with a woman. The sub-titles are for people who can't speak American. NSFW if you work amongst the humorless who can't handle the "F" word).

You have to suspect Julia Gillard has a wicked sense of humor.

Her note to parliament - based on a Sydney Morning Herald report that women had asked only 8.4% of Coalition questions despite making up twenty per cent of opposition parties - was clearly designed to stir the possums (Coalition women given the silent treatment in Parliament).

And stir the possums it did. First in parliament and now come on down dour hearted humorless Janet Albrechtsen in Feminists screwing it up for sisters.

Of course being Albrechtsen, her bashing of feminists is really code for bashing leftie feminists:

“What the hell has happened to feminism?” grumbled the Herald Sun’s Jill Singer a few weeks back. Here’s an idea. Feminists are screwing up feminism. Take last week. No matter which way you turned, women, especially those who talk most about feminism, were proving that women are often their own worst enemy ...

Just so you understand, that should have read: left wing feminists are screwing up feminism. Like Julia Gillard. And Jill Singer. Unlike right wing feminists. Like brave Janet Albrechtsen, who's not afraid to abuse women and feminists because it's for their own good. Men won't do it, someone has to do it, who better than Albrechtsen? Now read on:

... Forget about counting the number of women in the boardroom, in law firms or on the bench. The real sign of women’s emancipation is the number of questions they ask in parliament. Showing Labor’s enlightenment towards women, four female ALP backbenchers rose that day to ask questions of their frontbench big sisters.

Yes, and all the better to forget that the real killer that ignoble day was in fact the discovery that the Liberal web site dedicated to women largely featured men (you can catch a video and related story here in Ex-Liberal minister joins sexism outcry). Which hastily led the Libs to do a re-jig of their web site on the spot, so there's no point linking to the newly reconstructed splendid feminist-loving site now on view.

Of course it's only politics, and jolly hockey sticks at ten paces. There's nothing deeply imbedded in the Liberal mindset from the bad old days.

Thinking she had the killer response to Labor’s brazen display of girl power, Opposition Deputy Leader Julie Bishop reminded them that their own Paul Keating used his maiden speech to describe the increasing number of women in the workforce as “something of which we should be ashamed”.

Break it up, girls. As Speaker Harry Jenkins, said at the end of a disgraceful question time, “Calm down ... Not one of the greatest moments for the house.” Indeed, it was a low point for women, too. Bishop’s retort was embarrassing. Keating’s comments, made in 1969, reflected a different era. The world, including Keating, has moved on. Hallelujah for that. Better if Bishop had pointed out that handing out lame dorothy dixers, prepared by the minister’s office, to backbenchers, who take turns jumping up like a ventriloquist’s doll, is hardly a sign of female political empowerment. It’s tokenism, pure and simple.

Oh yes, Dame Slap can dish it out to Julie Bishop as well as all those screeching pseudo-feminist harridans on the left.

And why has the world moved on from the good old days of Paul Keating, you might ask? Well surely it's because of the likes of Janet Albrechtsen and conservatives everywhere, all radical proponents of women's rights, and nothing at all to do with hysterical bra-burning feminists. I mean those pests in the Women's Electoral Lobby and such like were just hairy arm pit types who caused consternation to men, who were only too willing to retreat from their lurks and perks and positions of power and wealth. Lay down like lambs they did, and still they do it. While women just want more and more.

Because as we all know feminists are man haters. Yep, it explains everything:

This is feminism at its most flippant, phony and foolish. Deriding other women for not keeping up with Labor’s empty feminist question time gestures doesn’t advance the place of women. It’s just politics. But, then, feminism has rarely been about women. For so many feminists, feminism is, at its core, about pushing a particular agenda. For some ageing feminists, the agenda was, and sadly remains, one of man-hating. So it is with Adele Horin, The Sydney Morning Herald’s resident feminist.

On Saturday, Horin deconstructed the online responses to Singer’s sepia-soaked vision of early feminists “fighting sexual objectification by refusing to shave our legs and armpits, burning our bras and demonstrating for equal pay” in contrast to modern girls who are “behaving like brain-dead, underpaid and over-waxed hookers”.

Man haters! Only for some of course. But still while I've got that tar brush handy, may as well tar the lot in a go. Nothing like a job lot to keep pricing low.

Which of course begs the real question, which is age resentment, as Horin sounds nothing so much as like Miranda the Devine railing about the behavior of the young ladettes who should be taught sewing and turned into civilized, decent, polite ladies. How the old hate the young, and their wicked, wicked ways.

Because in the old days, as any decent feminist understood, hookers were in fact noble sex workers, proving the hard reality of sex and marriage as an economic contract in which men had the upper hand.

But speaking of hate, Albrechtsen then turns to what might be called a 'my hate mail is bigger and better than your hate mail' conversation. Is this what commentariat columnists must do when the size of the dick can't be the main point of comparison?

The online responses to Singer’s Herald Sun column revealed an avalanche of misogyny, wrote Horin. One chap told Singer to “suck it up princess and just worry about what fabric softner (sic) to put in the wash”. Aghast, Horin concluded: “The Herald Sun is not a fringe publication. This is a segment of ordinary Australian menfolk, unleashed.”

Now, I have more than a little experience with online hate mail. During the past few years, it has arrived each week in predictable lashings: rude, obnoxious, spiteful, nasty stuff. Like Singer, I’ve been told to get back in the kitchen (this chap would like my cooking even less than my writing). Some guy told me not to breed. (Too late.) The Australian is not a fringe publication. But you’d have to be desperate or dishonest to extrapolate from a group of unrepresentative online maddies, whether from the Left or Right, to the views of ordinary Australian menfolk.

To which inevitably the first wag off the block, perhaps an ordinary Australian manfolk, or perhaps an unrepresentative online maddie, replied to Albrechtsen's column:

Who cares? Yawn… Just show us your breasts while cooking us dinner and we’ll all be happy…

Yep, meantime the bland assertion that feminists are men haters can be passed over, because well you know it's true ... In fact, everything you feared about castrating, man-hating feminists is true.

Worse still, above and beyond being man haters, feminists are deluded utopians:

The fundamental mistake, made over and again by women such as Horin, is to assume that the world can be utopia or close to it. Alas, some men will take longer than Keating to come to a more enlightened view of women. Some may never get there. A mature, honest feminism would stop dwelling on the trivial and irrelevant.

Well I guess who does the dishes is trivial and irrelevant if you can afford a dishwasher. In fact there's probably an abundance of trivial and irrelevant parts of any power sharing arrangement which become redundant with the acquisition of wealth, and a smug, supercilious, condescending lifestyle.

But then contradiction is a key to Albrechtsen's style of argumentation:

In that vein, while Horin was lecturing an unrepresentative bunch of dopes for doing the men’s cause no favours, the same can be said for a bunch of women. Their constant cries of discrimination often do women no favours. Three decades ago, feminists maintained that equality in the workplace depended on universal child care for children and full-time work for women. Anything less was discrimination. Never mind that many women wanted to work part time to combine the cherished role of rearing children.

Having finally caught up with the notion that many women want this, the latest feminist demand is that part-time work be regarded as some kind of new human right.

Huh? So arranging part-time work to allow for child rearing was bad when feminists allegedly weren't interested in it, and now it's bad because feminists support it, trying to claim credit for wanting to allow women to work and rear children. Is this some kind of new order 'anything the feminists say, I'm agin it' routine, a kind of 'two feminist legs baad, four feminine legs' good attitude?

How quickly we forget that just forty three years ago women had to resign as permanent officers of the Australian public service if they got married (here). Until they lifted the bar. Just as we generously passed a referendum in relation to the black citizenry in 1967. Just think. You might still be working with someone who started their working life under that odious regimen.

Albrechtsen then goes into a case involving Marrickville Primary school and an assistant principal wanting to work part time, but since she uses the matter as a political football, I'm less inclined to do so (like, for instance, in the job application procedure, did the applicant state she wanted to work part time, and was that understood when the offer was made? Who knows, but the original story makes it clear that someone bungled and somewhere there was a distinct lack of communication. See here).

So let's stick to Albrechtsen's conclusions, and as usual, it's tough love. Sigh, yet more of the tough love.

While so many feminists refuse to accept it, some jobs demand full-time attention. Not every job can be done on a part-time basis.

Contrary to the newest feminist mantra, the world of work and families is not some kind of utopia where women (or men, for that matter) can have it all. Having children raises difficult, imperfect choices. You can do the full-time work, full-time child care caper. Or you can work part time, allowing more time at home with children. Each person will make a personal decision but whatever the choice, something has to give: whether it’s losing precious time with young children or making difficult career sacrifices. That applies to men as much as it does to women.

Oh enough already with the tough love. What on earth makes Albrechtsen think that feminists at large imagine society as a utopia, or that we'll ever reach utopia, unless of course you happen to be Geoff Dixon leaving Qantas with a cool $10 million plus in your kick as a reward for five months hard yakka. Or unless you happen to be a well fed member of the commentariat, who can talk of making difficult career sacrifices. Like should I work the ten hour shift at the check out or have a kid?

Because as usual Albrechtsen returns to a perennial theme. Which is how much better things are for women than for men.

Indeed, let me suggest that society’s bias makes it easier for women to work part time if their preference is to rear children, than for men to do so. So here’s another idea. How refreshing and grand it would be if women could sometimes, just sometimes, resist the temptation to treat every occasion as proof that women are being mistreated by a big bad boys’ world.

Which reminds me how much better off people are on the dole than working, and how much better off blacks are living on welfare, and how much better off the homeless are because they don't have the pressure of a mortgage.

Because deep down women are, you see, just whingers and whiners, while the people who really suffer are the men, who are hated by feminists and who have to live the fantasy that the world is run by the boys when we all know that men are just the way they are because of how their mothers treated them, turning them into Stockholm syndrome renegades with Freudian complexes ...

And so on and on, chattering and yaddering, which reminds me that the Seinfeld cast are reuniting under the banner of Larry David's seventh Curb Your Enthusiasm season (go here for a feature story on the reunion).

Will vain arrogant Larry be re-united with hapless estranged Cheryl? Now there's a feminist dilemma worth pondering.

Meantime, below I've added a few more Larry David moments, and both - especially a season capper involving Larry's desire to show love for a Tourette's syndrome chef working in his restaurant - are definitively Not Safe For Work. Sure it's a Rabelaisian vision of euphoric euphonious obscenity, the ultimate retort to Albrechtsen, but that's what makes it NSFW!!

I don't why the desire to run these clips popped up in the context of reading Janet Albrechtsen - I could have put up some stereotypical, cliched pictures of feminists burning bras in the nineteen sixties, or perhaps a snap of a hairy arm pit - but somehow it did, and it felt right. Hmm, what is it about Larry David that reminds me of Albrechtsen? Never mind. Apparently David clips are big on the Facebook circuit at the moment.

You can of course find more Larry David excerpts on YouTube, but really all six seasons are now available on DVD at low prices if you have a taste for offensiveness.

Some people can't stand the show, others find his curmudgeonly ways appealing, especially if they happen to live with a Larritus davidus sub species of the offensive male. So it goes.