Janet Albrechtsen, and time for a load of red herrings and disclaimers ...

(Above: spoiler and red herring alert, that's where this piece is headed, and what a tragic place it is too).

The red herring ploy is the cruellest trick a writer can play on a hapless reader.

Back in the day, very young and innocent, I was astonished to discover the device in Agatha Christie's Ten Little Niggers (these days called And Then There Were None or Ten Little Indians - who cares about indigenous sensitivities - but the original title gives you the whiff of the demographics and the embedded empire attitudes in the work).

Christie's cheap trick was to send ten naughty people to an island, and kill them one by one, but - spoiler alert - one of the deaths is faked, and it turns out a judge contrived his own death (sixth in the sequence), while punishing the guilty and leaving the fuzz with an "unsolvable" mystery.

It was an outrageously hokey device of the kind loved by readers of crime and mystery novels, and following on the news that Santa Claus was a cruel conspiracy by adults, the Easter Bunny an excuse to get kids mainlining chocolate, and Jesus a kind of dress-up charades for practising cannibals, it robbed childhood of any last innocence.

But what, you might ask, does this have to do with the commentariat?

Well, if you read Janet Albrechtsen today in Let's not be tethered by simple sexual stereotypes, you'll get a quick answer.

In the process of putting on her sophisticated inner city elite sexually aware and responsive hat for the day, Albrechtsen starts by doing a quick tour of the implications of Sex and the City, followed by some throwaway thoughts on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case, and the matter of vaginal bruising.

Any regular reader of Albrechtsen will have already suffered through her love of the show before (sometimes worse than spending an hour with a Trekkie), but at least this time you can learn about the art of the red herring:

Before we look at why sex pushes even more thoughtful minds to jump to stereotypes about women, let's extract DSK from this discussion. This is not about his innocence or guilt.

Yep, it turns out that the entire detour into Strauss-Kahn territory has even less tangential relevance to Albrechtsen's argument than the wayward judge does to honest plotting in the Christie novel, except it allows her to slag off Richard Ackland and float into the ether the notion that the hotel maid might just have been allowing Strauss-Kahn a chance to let loose his inner goat.

This allows another Christie trick to take a walk in the park.

The balanced slagging off of both characters:

After all, if the plaintiff has a credibility problem, so does the defendant. Apart from his backward Keynesian views about spending, the French politician who wants to be president has a tainted track record involving other allegations of sexual misconduct against him.

Yep, they might both be as guilty as hell, since you can't trust a Keynesian anywhere, let alone in bed (and speaking of Keynes, it's worth remembering that he lived a splendid second life of cruising, copulating and cock-sucking, as evoked in The Sex Diaries of John Maynard Keynes and other pieces on the web).

But back to that damned red herring:

The point is not about DSK and the chambermaid.

WTF? Well if it's not about them, why spend a couple of pars on them?

It's about the stubborn puritanism that says if a woman is bruised during sex, then it must be rape.

But actually in the context of a woman accusing a man of rape, it might well be argued that vaginal bruising must be considered in the context of a charge of rape. Or is the pond missing something?

Sensing she's got into deep water, Albrechtsen then has to produce another red herring disclaimer:

Let's lay it out in the clearest of terms. If it's consensual, it's not rape, even if it's rough. Surely we should have learned by now not to prescribe the choices women make about how they conduct their sexual lives, whether these choices are totally white-bread or rough and rollicking or somewhere in between.

Uh huh. Well that's very inner city sophisticated urban elite for Albrechtsen, but pray tell, what on earth has it got to do with the hotel maid and Strauss-Kahn - since who knows what went on in the room except the participants - and why did Albrechtsen take that particular detour?

Well it's to do a variant on Bettina Arndt, without quite understanding that the Arndt line insists that it's repressive, prudish women who are doing down men.

This gets Albrecthsen into a double bind, what we might call the Samuel Richardson v Henry Fielding, Pamela v bawdy women routine (yep, it's as old as the eighteenth century, this routine, with Tom Jones published in 1749 and Pamela in 1740, and don't go quoting Aristophanes at me).

Let's hear it for Tom Jones first:

Haven't we yet learned that when it comes to the complicated story of female sexuality, one size doesn't fit all? And neither should it. Women's empowerment ought to champion the fact that different women want different things, be it in the bedroom or elsewhere. That more enlightened view means the past sexual proclivities of women have long stopped being relevant in rape prosecutions. A woman who likes rough sex can also be the victim of rape. By the same token, let's repeat that rough sex does not equal rape.

Yes, yes, bawdy is as bawdy does, but now let's remember that in the end women are to blame, with all the prudish Pamelas of the world standing by to take the rap:

Alas, women are not alone when it comes to being on the receiving end of stubborn, moralising assumptions about sex. Plenty of skewed sexual assumptions are made by women about men. In fact, most of the public debate over morality in the bedroom is now conducted entirely by women; men rarely dare voice an opinion lest they be shouted down. Writing in The Age last week, Bettina Arndt gave the perfect example about a man who got into all sorts of trouble for writing about his "inner goat". His article, published in Britain's The Telegraph Magazine, agonised about the fact that while "on the surface, you may look like a gentleman, inside, you're a goat".

Yep, there it is, a palpable hit. You see the bawds that like rough sex can instantly transmute into ball-busting prudes, and so Men rarely dare voice an opinion lest they be shouted down.

So it's up to Albrechtsen and Arndt to do it for them?

Well if you want to refer to the Telegraph article, you can head off to The lust that dare not speak its name, wherein you will find a rather banal piece saturated with English class assumptions about a poignant Prufock who'd like to fuck around, or at least not be judged harshly by fantasising about fucking around, and fucking like a goat. How wild does it get?

Ted says, 'They could have bars where the girls keep their clothes on, but tell you they want to have sex. You'd talk about it for a while. Then you would say, "No thanks, I'm married." And then you'd go home. That would be better than watching girls take their pants off and sticking their bottoms in your face.'

Lordy, lordy. Put it another way:

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. (and the rest of Prufrock here. If you re-read it, then at least this entire discussion has provided one redemptive moment).

But I digress, I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled and encourage lesbian fantasies in anonymous writers for the UK Telegraph.

Back to Albrechtsen and her final prescription that will fix everything:

Challenging the cultural fault lines about sex unsettles many people. The intimate business of men and women living and loving together is tricky territory. Those who still succumb to simplistic assumptions - be it about men and their inner goat or women and their desires - should try to catch repeat episodes of Sex and the City screening on television just about any day of the week. Just don't assume all women fit neatly into the characters of Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda or Samantha. Happily, the reality is far more complex than that.

Take episodes of Sex and the City daily until cured, as a solution to the tricky territory of relationships between men and women?

Eek.

Okay, okay, it's the perfect red herring. The show is perhaps the ultimate expression of inner city elite attitudes as found in Manhattan and re-interpreted by a largely male creative team, and at any other time in the week would be exposed by the commentariat as part of the dangerous decadence and soft, idle sophistication that's undermining western civilisation as we know it, and done by a liberal Hollywood elite lacking proper mainstream suburban values.

So here's the pond's red herring.

This entire piece is actually about gay marriage, and wondering - since Albrechtsen fancies herself as something of an expert on cultural fault lines and tricky territory - why she opposes the concept, as enunciated in pieces such as Judges should butt out of politics, where she blames the whole notion of gay marriage on activist judges over-riding the will of the majority.

Here's the thing. If it's okay for men in the UK to have fantasies about lesbians getting it on, what's so wrong about lesbians wanting to ditch their wild fornicating ways and settle down in suburban conformity in married coupledom?

I guess that Albrechtsen has already provided the answer:

Challenging the cultural fault lines about sex unsettles many people. The intimate business of men and men and women and women living and loving together is tricky territory.

Especially if at other times of the week, you're inclined to forget you're an urban sophisticate of the Sex and the City kind, and revert to the business of peddling standard Miranda the Devine routines straight out of the Catholic play book ...

And now for the inevitable disclaimer. The pond has no trouble with rough sex or pornography or men or women who like it (except for the pornographic censoring mentality of Stephen Conroy). The pond isn't in to self-loathing ...

The pond also has quite a bit of time for Slutwalk and feminists taking to the streets to reclaim 'slut' in style, no matter the pounding that event and the participants got from the commentariat.

But it has extreme problems with red herrings, and even more problems with confused arguments and befuddled logic, especially when it comes to pleading for the right of men to lead rich fantasy lives while trapped in monogamy, while arguing against the rights of gays to be trapped in monogamy and so then be able to lead rich fantasy lives ...

Now let's consult the oracle:

Charlotte: I'm so confused. Is he gay or is he straight?
Carrie: It's not that simple anymore. The real question is; is he a straight gay man, or is he a gay straight man?
Samantha: Hopefully, he's a gay straight guy, which means he's straight with a lot of gay qualities. Whereas, a straight gay guy, is just a gay guy who plays sports and won't fuck you.

Even worse, he might be a gay talent agent, and get married in the movie Sex and the City 2, which did as much as it could to set gay marriage back by a decade, and the movie industry back by a century ...

Well at least we haven't had to think about Australian politics and for that we should be grateful ...

(Below: and now since the pond is always keen on dress as a guide, here's a quick guide to Janet Albrechtsen).