Paul Sheehan, the lads from The Punch, and more insights into women than a feminist could offer in a month of Sundays ...

(Above: Erin Lavoie with axe, or ax if you come from elsewhere).

Is it part of a vast conspiracy, or just a humble coincidence?

Over at The Sydney Morning Herald, Paul Sheehan goes rampantly, stridently feminist with One giant scar on mankind.

And over at The Punch, Chairman Rupert's contribution to the full to overflowing intertubes, the blowtorch of insight is turned on women in Guys talk about female body image.

As you might expect from the brave lads at The Punch, it's a cornucopia of clever political correctness gone wild.

Lordy, there's Joe Hildebrand and he's just so down with the gals, he shouts Fat bottomed girls you make the rockin' world go round, complete with a bit of borrowed (we won't use the word stolen) digital content from YouTube.

Joe's so completely in tune with cliches in terms of women by penning this monstrous insight about women dressing for women and therefore operating in a delicate female ecosystem of insecurity and ruthlessness, in a harmony maintained by stabbing rivals in the eye with a stilleto:

If women actually did dress to attract men none of this would be necessary. They would all simply look like Daisy Duke.+ And of course if they do that they risk the disapproval of their peers and thus being attacked by the aforementioned stiletto. This can also lead to feelings of isolation and sadness. A rather vampish ex-girlfriend of mine once captured this in a single heartbreaking sentence when, while over-applying her make up in a pub bathroom, she remarked to a friend: “Why do I do it to myself?”^

And so perhaps women try to keep themselves rakish not so much in the deluded belief that they will be more attractive to men but in an effort to keep pace with their equally unhappy sisterhood, who are also teetering through life looking mournfully at shopfront cakes.

It is a sorrowful existence and one that deserves some emancipation. Thankfully the will is there. As a friend of mine once said very sweetly: “Don’t you just love it how girls say ‘Am I fat?’ and you say ‘Nah, you’re not fat at all’ and give them a little slap on their fat arse.” It made me smile, it made him smile and it even made the girl smile, even though she had no idea what was going on.

So cheer up everybody and let’s all get some ice cream.

Oh Joe, you say the sweetest things, and all to help the unhappy sisterhood in their unhappy teetering existence. It would be such fun to give your fat bum a firm slapping and watch it wobble as you get emancipated from your smart arse condecension ...

But wait, then there's Chris Deal, and his brand of feminism makes Joe's look like a kindergarten tryout, but then Chris has an advantage, because his thinking was formed by working at Zoo Weekly, wherein he was surrounded by hot chicks with big boobs. Men: we really are as dumb as you think is the header, and by golly, Chris does his level best to prove the header is mild understatement.

A little known fact I like to trot out at feminist rallies and family gatherings is that I use to work for the esteemed gentlemen’s periodical, Zoo Weekly magazine. Officially my title was Online Editor, but unofficially it was You Tube surfer and talker to the hottest chicks planet earth has ever produced.

Sadly my tenure at the Encyclopaedia Tit-tanica was brief, and a decision that to the male ego sounds like the frothy rantings of a mad man. In bloke-speak the phrase “I quit a job at Zoo Weekly” roughly translates to “I’m a frightful shirtlifter, pass the amyl and pump up the Right Said Fred”.

Poor Chris is full of sensitive yearnings, most of which seem to revolve around sorting some kind of childhood Freudian trauma involving breast feeding:

Call me crazy, a maverick if you will, but I don’t see what’s so great about being forced to look at hot women all day, when none of them are even remotely interested in letting you touch their boobs.

Trotting up to Zoo every day was like a vagrant being forced to sit at Tetsuya’s for eight hours straight reading nothing but cookbooks. And while working at a lad’s mag is one thing, buying one is something else. Most blokes either love it, or are too entranced by the saucy smoke and mirrors to even notice they’re being had.

Ah the boob touching. So sweet and yearning. Like a sweater clad lad in a car in the fifties still trying to get to first base, and thinking third base must be on the moon.

It turns out Chris, transformed by his time at Zoo, has become a romantic of the first water:

Forget the lad’s mags, mag lads. They’re a con.

Stop drinking the Kool-Aid. Unplug from the Matrix. Put down the pages, take a deep breath and drink in the amazing, beautiful woman sitting next to you. You’ll know her because she’ll be the one laughing at all your bad jokes, not bringing up your expanding girth, and hasn’t been manufactured by Adobe Photoshop.

Give her a kiss, tell her that you love her, and maybe, just maybe, she’ll let you touch her boobs.

Yep, boob touching. A first base of pawing and groping and clutching and squeezing.

That'll ensure a deep, sustaining, intense and involving relationship every time. And the sex ... totally wild.

By sheer good fortune, Chris also reveals that he likes to attend Marrickville Metro in the hope of finding a woman who will come up to him while he's getting a large banana buzz and say "Excuse me, do you know where Kmart is oh and can you please touch my boobs?"

No worries gormless Chris. That's my local too. If I happen to catch you standing near a juice counter clutching a banana buzz, I'll make sure to rock up and give you a grope. I might be inclined to twist your balls into a mangled knot, but hey it's all just a jolly jape amongst chums, and the sheerest good fun.

But wait it wouldn't be a day of full on frontal lobe feminism if we didn't have an offering from Penbo, that brave Adelaide lad always ready to stand rock solid with womenfolk.

This girl looks normal: The 100 man body image survey is Penbo's completely scientific and profoundly insightful survey of the state of male and female relationships, and accompanied by a wonderful profound YouTube clip featuring an interview with a model who is 'curvy' and explains how guys really like 'the curves'.

Reading the survey was transformative and revelatory, and it now forms a substantial part of The Punch's very special body image section. If the lads keep going, soon they'll achieve the feminist wisdom of Woman's Day, or perhaps the ultimate dream, New Idea.

Well at last I have an understanding of the social community envisioned by Mark Day that Chairman Rupert would produce to prise coinage from our wallets and purses.

You might call it dumb fuck tabloidism, but I call it emancipatory, because it means it's a club which, if it accepted my membership, is certainly not a club to which I would belong (sorry Groucho, but I had to mangle the phrase, because these are turkeys up with whom I will not put).

Still, it made it ever so much more poignant and insightful when returning to Paul Sheehan's rampant feminism:

The oppression of women has made a big comeback. Western feminism, it turns out, has triggered a vigorous counter-reformation. The world is engaged in a clash of civilisations, purportedly about religion, but in reality it is about the rights and freedoms of women. This is the true flashpoint of our age.

Now perhaps you might not understand the code words here. The true flashpoint of our age?What that might be? There's the answer at the bottom of the page, but it might not be what you're expecting, considering the way some religions carry on about women.

Perhaps you think it's about a recent fuss at a University of Sydney college:

The scandal at the all-male St Paul's College at the University of Sydney, where a group of male students engaged in crude and ugly anti-women posturing, is merely a variation on a theme.

No, no, not that. Just a variation on a theme.

Perhaps you've come up with a different answer. It's not religion, and it's not really even the fault of men. It's really the fault of progressives joined in an unholy alliance:

The most recent and most scathing commentary has come from a British journalist, Melanie Phillips, whose new book, Londonistan, examines the culture which produced last year's terrorist bombings in London by British Muslims. She is outraged by the dangerous hypocrisy of self-styled "progressives": "It is remarkable that the left … with its obsessions with issues like gay rights, equality for women and sexual licence … should have forged an alliance with radical Islamists who preach death to gays, the subjugation of women and the stoning of adulterers. It is an eye-opener to see, on the streets of London, so-called 'progressives' marching shoulder to shoulder with radical Islamists under the metaphorical banner of human rights and the literal banners of Hamas."

In Australia, much the same. Prominent feminists have responded to the cascade of reactionary provocations by Muslim men in this country with an ideological forbearance, and a pall of silence.

The silence of the lambs.

You can find that here, in A shameful silence on women's rights.

Yep, as is the usual way, it's women's fault for women being victims. Sure Muslim men are a problem, but they pale into insignificance up against progressive leftie feminists.

Even so, you probably think the answer to the quiz - the clash of civilizations, purportedly about religion - involves Muslims.

Allow me to throw a little Paul Sheehan magic dust in your eyes. You thought we were talking about Muslim men?

Wrong, and for this we must turn to Much more than whore, wife, virgin.

First, let's get the sluts and the tartlets out of the way (yes, I know it's not that feminist to talk about women as tartlets on the basis of the clothes they wear, and likely enough that they're offensively young in the eyes of the average curmudgeon, but read on):

I went to the Royal Easter Show last week with Paris Hilton and Ashlee Simpson. I had no choice. It was impossible to avoid them. There were at least 20,000 Paris and Ashlee clones sauntering about.

So pervasive was the presence and conformity of these MTV tartlets, and so dominant was the religion of celebrity and consumption, that it was refreshing to encounter a subversive, unpretentious female subculture at the show. I found them inside the woodchopping stadium.

Yes, real women, real feminists chop wood. Not like those bloody tartlets, which neatly manages to combine tart and harlot and starlet all in one evocative put down of 'gals':

Young women in workmen's singlets wielding axes, saws and chainsaws with seriousness and skill was a healthy antidote to the vapidity outside the woodchopping stadium and the vapidity of Easter in general.

And you know that's real glamour, with calloused hands and bulging muscles stirring the loins in the same way The Punch writers seem to want to touch boobies:

Because Americans are good at glamour, even their woodchopping women's team (they call them lumberjills) is no exception. One of the stars of the team, Erin Lavoie, a lean, modest, good-looking logger and welder from Spokane, Washington, is also a champion woodchopper and axe thrower. She told me she trains every lunchtime at her job at a logging mill, and runs most days.

"It's mostly technique," she told me, trying to explain the absence of calloused hands and bulging muscles.

Thank god, not a progressive feminist latte sipping chardonnay swilling leftist in sight. Now you might think a young woman can dress as she likes and not get called a tartlet by an old grump, but then likely you're an over-sensitive, perhaps hysterical woman, and you really can only contribute to the debate after taking a valium and having a good lie down.

You see, woodchoppers, body builders, girls who want to be Brittney, any color and shape of your empowered desire ... it might all sound feminist, but the only empowering that counts is the kind of empowering that impresses Paul Sheehan and the gormless Punch lads ...

But wait, we still haven't sorted out the clash of civilizations and religion that threatens to bring women down. Worked it out yet?

Jesus Christ came out of a society where men did not speak in public to women who were not related to them. Sound familiar? Yet Christ's attitude towards women was modestly subversive of this convention, and his relationship with Mary Magdalene was more subversive still. As the church rigidified, and evolved into an instrument for male domination and sexual control, Mary Magdalene had to be downscaled and discredited. By the fourth century, Christ's mother had been declared a virgin and the Gnostics, who venerated Mary Magdalene as Christ's favourite disciple, had been wiped off the spiritual landscape. By the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great had declared Mary Magdalene a whore. By the 12th century, priests were barred from having sexual relations. Wives were out.

What helped change the trend was the discovery of the Gnostic Gospels and their eventual publication in the 1960s. By 1969, Mary Magdalene was no longer a prostitute in Catholic teaching. By the late 1970s, an explosion of Magdalenia scholarship was underway, pushed along by feminism, postmodernism and Gnosticism. Suddenly, Mary M was no longer a whore, no longer a minor scriptural figure; she was the woman in Christ's life.

The rest is publishing history. The revival and restoration of Mary Magdalene, and the enormous popular appetite for Magdalenia, represents a hunger for a Christianity in which women are neither whores nor virgins, but partners and disciples.

Many, many women understand this. Does the Vatican? (here).

Phew, for a moment there I'll bet you were thinking that the real enemy of women was sociopathic murderers or Muslims or left progressive feminists who remain silent or form filthy alliances with the patriarch while the sisterhood goes to the dogs, or the lickspittle aggregation of booby yearning writers assembled to pen banalities for The Punch.

Nope, it's the Vatican.

Put it another way, if you ever want to understand why the relationship between men and women in Australia is problematic, just read the male writers given a voice in these publications, and contemplate that the female voices are dominated by the likes of Miranda the Devine and Janet Albrechtsen.

Beyond incomprehension into the land of befuddlement. So it goes.

Now pardon me while I go out the back to work on callousing my hands and bulging my muscles with a bit of sawing, weights work and rural woodchopping ...