Paul Sheehan, and tuppawukka stiletto thoughts for the ageing conservative white male ...

(Above: an artistic impression of the tuppawuka interior, with its authentic Maori hue).

Crucial news from New Zealand as the tupperwaka (say it as "tuppawuka" with a rich emphasis on the "u's") controversy continues to rage and grow.

Yes, the scandal of a plastic NZ$2 million waka, to be unveiled - or perhaps erected and unveiled - at the rugby union World Cup in September continues to shock, consternate and outrage the good citizens of New Zelund.

Start with Two week waka: $2m and then follow the links, perhaps to the NZ Herald's concerned editorial Party Central gets Maori face. Or you could look up the meaning of storm in a teacup, which is to say excitabat enim fluctus in simpulo, or stirring up waves in a ladle.

Meanwhile, in other news the conservative NZ government presses on with a PP ploy to deliver UFB - which is to say Ultra Fast Broadband - to 70% of the citizenry at speeds approaching 100 mbps. Naturally the Labor opposition fiercely opposes the waste and the extravagance, and condemns the plan as certain to fail. Which leaves the citizenry lost in a wasteland featuring the most appalling and expensive broadband service to be found in an allegedly civilised country ... Mention viewing videos on the full to overflowing intertubes and contemplate the blank faces.

Meanwhile, in other news, the conservative NZ government continues to supervise an Emissions Trading Scheme, at a modest carbon price, so that proprieties are observed and nothing meaningful accomplished. While the economy is in a perilous state, nobody considers the ETS to blame, but naturally the big endians and little endians are still in fierce debate about the merits of the scheme (wiki here). Yes, it's possible to have an ETS without causing the sky to fall in, which will find many other ways to fall in instead ...

Showing all the signs of Bob Carr syndrome, the country prepares for the World Cup as if it will be redemptive. Someone from Sydney should turn up to discuss post-Olympic depressive trauma and its implications for the cup post party and the island.

Same mad hatter's tea party, different island across the Tasman.

Speaking of mad hatters, today is Paul Sheehan day, and so as a distraction from distracted New Zelunders, the pond celebrates an imminent return to the land of loons by contemplating Sheehan slagging off feminism in Scarlet soles are a red rag to feminists' ideology.

In his usual gadfly way - depth for Sheehan is a foreign concept - he hops around high heel shoes with red-lacquered soles, veers erratically towards 'jurassic' seventies feminism, slags off said feminism, berates Betty Friedan, decides all feminism is a kind of warped leftism, attributes everything to world war two, and decides that the mothering drive, fertility and power displays are loaded with a density of meaning.

Sadly, it appears this aged ideological warrior is incapable of deciphering said 'density of meaning', at least if he decides that designer shoes are some kind of key indicator, and he can cram the history of feminism and the fight for women's rights into a breathtakingly narrow and superficial single column.

But then we've been there before, at least with Sheehan's obsession with fashion, as he revealed in Wintour of women's discontent that he was little more than a stalker, seeking out the discarded invitations of Anna Wintour, and getting her to autograph one. And after this bizarre display of obsessive, not to say slightly weird behaviour, in which he celebrates leaving nineties Paris with his pants smeared with blood and wine and a telephone number written in lipstick, he had the cheek to say that women have their insecurities played upon and preyed upon by the fashion industry. What to make of the insecurities of a stalker displaying a lust for the discarded invitations of Anna Wintour?

Never mind. The superficial is the world that Sheehan loves to inhabit, and naturally since he has an inner city elitist mentality of the wine-smeared kind, he pays disproportionate attention to the role of the fashion industry, as if eight hundred buck shoes were the kind of apparel most women could afford.

But when you apply this kind of standard, you can get away with nonsensical sleight of hand:

Anyone who still wants to see the world through the prism of gender fixation, where women are structural victims and men are structural oppressors, is locked into a fusty bigotry that the stiletto generations are walking away from.

Yep, if you wear stilettos and wonder why men continue to dominate board rooms in Australia, you're locked into fusty concepts, and you must walk away from the concept that women might have a role to play in said boardrooms. This is preferably done while muttering how irrational women are and how incapable they are of reasoned argument.

And then there's credit stealing. You see changes in society had nothing to do with women:

All the great recent advances made for women have been made by people - men and women working together. Most of the legislation that seeks to advance the progress of women has been passed by legislatures dominated by men.

And anyway women are bitches, especially to other women (let's not even mention the way they treat men):

And no amount of government social engineering is going to stop women behaving badly to women, which happens all the time. Women bully women. Women block women in the workforce.

You might of course say the same about bastards, and their bullying male ways, but what would be the point of stating the bleeding obvious? And so elevate the banal into a pointless cliche?

Well there's no amount of government social engineering that will stop the average commentariat commentator from wearing their stupidity on their keyboard, and so the one sided irrational diatribe continues, and Sheehan reveals himself to be an ageing ideological warrior still locked into the old wars of the nineteen seventies.

Still, there's something to be said for this damning self-insight of his role in those wars:

Sheehan was not a scholar; he was a journalist. He was not oppressed; he was privileged. He was not rigorously impartial; he was a hardline right winger. He was not honest, and sought to downplay his early 'magic water' migrant bashing work, feted by the extreme right, even unto Storm Front. He also mined the work of other right wing commentators for his scribbles but gave no credit. Above all, Sheehan was a navel gazer. His reactionary white male conservatism was about middle-class, middle-brow white men suffering an ageing crisis, relevancy deprivation syndrome, an attachment to expensive bread, and a hostility towards the different, the left, the independent, the green, the alternate, combined with a remarkable capacity for sweeping statements.

Oh okay that's a slight re-hash of the envious Sheehan scribbling snidery about Betty Friedan, as he shows how easy character assassination can be, and then, in a leap and a bound, transfers the snidery to the world stage:

These flaws were not hers alone. They can still be found embedded in feminist ideology. We are living in the middle of a massive global struggle over the rights and freedoms of women, a life-and-death matter for a billion women and girls, and secular middle-class Western feminism is proving irrelevant.

Golly gee, if secular feminism is irrelevant, you can multiply Paul Sheehan's irrelevance - or should that be active hostility - by a million, as he seems incapable of grasping that the shoes people wear have bugger all to do with the role they might play in the workforce, or the lives they might lead outside the workforce.

Which is how we come, by the end of the column, and after a detour explaining how world war two demographics were really the cause of it all - and never mind the cosy nineteen fifties notion following the war that it was the business of women to return to home-making - to perhaps the ultimate stupidity:

Society is still trying to reconcile the distortions caused by the most important difference between the genders: the mothering drive. This is the bedrock on which family and culture is built. Yet women must assume all the risks of fertility. It is a fundamental inequality.

There scribbles an unreconstructed pre-feminist man, a dinosaur - or perhaps a giraffe - full of ideas of fundamental inequality, as if fathers have no fathering drive, and if actual procreation was some awesome risk.

Lurking behind it, you might think, is a deeply Victorian sensibility, but it's also impossible not to get the whiff of the mad Islamic notion that the place for women is out of sight in the home breeding, or otherwise suffering the fundamental inequality of the mothering drive, thereby leaving men to get on with men's - and women's - business.

For all the blather about how men and women are doing it together, Sheehan clearly hasn't the first clue.

So let's turn to Betty Friedan for an insight:

The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban housewife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, or read a column by Paul Sheehan, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: 'Is this all?'

Fortunately it's not all, and there's much more to women and feminism and the history thereof and life, and work, and love, and dress sense, and shoe wear, and if you wander around New Zealand you can marvel at the resolute lack of Parisian fashion and the sedate ways of what passes for the right wing commentariat ...

Over here, as a thinker Paul Sheehan might well be dubbed a tuppawunka ... and they wouldn't be far off the mark.

(Below: so quickly superficial scribblers forget as they forage through sweeping statements and breathtaking generalisations. Take the women's suffrage movement for starters.)

Oh alright, and let's throw in a tasty image from the seventies, if only because it's likely to send Paul Sheehan into a righteous stiletto-heeled frenzy.