An Orwellian George Brandis, and please someone bring on the Amazons to give Clive Hamilton a really hard time ...

(Above: Roza Yegorovna Shanina, 1924-1945, more here).

You have to admire the sheer unmitigated cheekiness of George Brandis scribbling away in Section 18C has no place in a society that values freedom of expression.

It seems the section of the federal Act that brought poor old Andrew Bolt thudding to the ground, along with the inaccuracies, the googling and the snide insinuations, was all the fault of the Keating Government, in spite of all the splendid efforts of the opposition:

The government dismissed with contempt the Liberal Party's concerns about the effect of the new provisions on freedom of expression. Then minister for immigration and ethnic affairs Nick Bolkus, apparently oblivious to the Orwellian resonances of his rhetoric, described the conduct that the bill sought to outlaw as "speech crimes".

Speaking of Orwellian, no matter its Godwin's Law implications, the way that Brandis manages to disappear the Howard government from history is quite remarkable.

If 18C was so Orwellian, why did the Howard government, including its collective gaggle of ministers and the babbling Brandis not do something about it in their ten plus years in power, most particularly when they had control of both houses?

Well it's really just another opportunity for Brandis to sound off, dragging in the Malaysia Solution, which he finds immoral, and never mind any immorality that might be attached to the Nauru solution, and he finds the carbon tax flagrantly dishonest, never mind the flagrant dishonesty that might be attached to proponents of 'climate change is crap', especially when proposing to shovel substantial amounts of taxpayer cash down the throats of industry.

Naturally it's all dressed up by Brandis in proper piety, with deep concern about freedom of expression, freedom of political discourse and so on and so forth, and the cry that the provision in its present form should be repealed, if not overturned on appeal.

It would be nice to try to explain the Bolt case as an example of the unintended consequences of poor draftsmanship and legislative overreach. I fear it is nothing of the sort. It is precisely what those who amended the Racial Discrimination Act in 1995 intended to achieve. We should, in that sense, be grateful to Justice Bromberg for exposing its full implications.

And no doubt some will be grateful to Justice Bromberg for exposing how the Howard government sat on its collective bums for a decade.

Meanwhile, if the matter is so outrageous, why haven't Herald and Weekly Times filed an appeal, quickstix and licketty splits?

Even if destined to lose the appeal, surely they should explore every avenue at once to right this grievous judicial error? Why are they waiting until next week to make up their minds about an appeal? Where's the concern for truth, justice, righteousness and Andrew Bolt? (Herald and Weekly Times weighs up appeals against Bolt judgment).

Could they be inclined to defeatism? Could they be a bit canny, a bit Scottish, a bit Shylockian?

Oops, I see that these expressions might now bring down the wrath of 18C on the pond. Who'd of thunk it, the Bolt and the pond and St. Sebastian, all martyrs to the cause of offensiveness ... (yes, you can rely on St Sebastian to get rid of a plague of liberals and urban elites, in much the same way as he removed the pestilence from Rome).

Meanwhile, over in the Fairfax rags, there's a splendid offering from Clive Hamilton, as he gets his knickers in a knot in Women at war is the final surrender.

Clive is most upset at the notion that women should be allowed to do anything men can do, provided they're appropriately qualified, and it seems the recent decision to allow women to train as professional killers is the final straw, the last post to be sounded over the rotting corpse of feminism.

You see, Clive fondly thinks of women as Jane Austen types, a restraining, civilising influence on the brutish cads known as men

Putting women in the front line is a victory only for the campaign to obliterate difference, as if everything women were before the advent of feminism was the creation of patriarchy. But didn't women's life experiences and history provide distinctive qualities more needed today than ever? We should celebrate the uniquely female rather than bury it under the demand for equality.

Well so much for the myth of the Amazons (now traduced and obliterated by having an intertubes peddler of books named after them). So much for valiant queen Boudica, taking it up to the filthy Romans way back in AD 60-61. So much for Jeanne d'Arc taking it up to the filthy English swine as she farted in their general direction late in the Hundred Years war. So much indeed for any number of women who make it into the wiki List of women warriors in folklore (and in history).

So much, indeed, for the heroic efforts of women in the Russian military, during the first and second world wars, and they too have a wiki at Women in the Russian and Soviet military.

In the second world war:

The Soviet Union also used women for sniping duties extensively, and to great effect, including Nina Alexeyevna Lobkovskaya and Ukrainian Lyudmila Pavlichenko (who killed over 300 enemy soldiers). The Soviets found that sniper duties fit women well, since good snipers are patient, careful, deliberate, can avoid hand-to-hand combat, and need higher levels of aerobic conditioning than other troops.

It astonished the pond to hear Neil James, ADA sage, confess that he knew nothing of women in the military in Russia, and in the two world wars and the Soviet civil war, as he busily tried to airbrush women out of military history in general.

But it says a lot about Clive Hamilton and Neil James that they should be in bed together on the matter:

ADA sage Neil James says that women will suffer disproportionate casualties as soldiers, and that vapid, flighty feminists will have blood on their hands far beyond their usual Gaia-mother, natural-birth, placenta-milkshake experience. He can’t really explain why women would have disproportionate casualties if they had to pass the same tests, reach the same standards, and undertake the same training as men. (Front line women ... if they're good enough, they're good enough).

Hamilton goes into the same vapid hand-wringing mode:

War best represents the continued hegemony of male thinking, with the grunt culture of hyper-masculinity inescapable because survival depends on it. And no institution more purely reflects the male understanding of power than the armed forces, built on the idea that the world is a place of conflict where disputes can be resolved by lethal force, and the more lethal the better.

You see women are different, and inclined to get the vapours, and getting the vapours is good:

Women's morality differs from men's. Feminist philosopher Carol Gilligan argues women are motivated more by care than duty, and inclined more to emphasise responsibilities than rights. They seek reconciliation through the exercise of compassion and negotiation rather than demanding "justice", through force if necessary.

Just weigh up the vast offensiveness of that line Women's morality differs from men. Yep, it's the very same routine that saw women shunted into being nurses instead of doctors, into being nuns rather than cardinals, into typists rather than the boardroom ...

Well it wouldn't be a Clive Hamilton rant without sex rearing its ugly head:

Patriarchy, it now seems, was not endemic to the social body but was only a blemish that could be wiped away. The six o'clock swill may be gone but our society is more male-oriented than ever - more competitive, more individualistic, more money-hungry. And more sex-soaked.

What's this got to do with women in the military? Sweet bugger all, but it allows Clive to get on his hobby horse as he yearns for a return to the good old days of a chaste Victorian world where the woman endures, perhaps closes her eyes, and suffers, as opposed to all that Regency tommy rot about wenches who don't mind a roll in the hay:

Backed by the porn industry and popular media, sex is increasingly presented as a pleasant pastime devoid of sentiment and commitment. The centuries-old male fantasy of "ridding sexuality of any emotional connotation in order to bring it back into the realm of pure entertainment", as Michel Houellebecq put it, has finally been fulfilled.

Uh huh. As usual women don't get any say in the matter.

Clive is determined that women change the world, since men have made such a hash of it, but if they're successful, by definition they're not changing the world:

So the far-reaching social change envisaged by feminism in the '60s and '70s attains its pinnacle with targets to put more women into boardrooms and cabinets. But why bother putting women into boardrooms if the corporations they run continue to despoil the environment, evade their taxes and pay their chiefs obscene salaries?

Yep, get back to the nunneries women, and show the way forward.

Because deep down Clive is a mother Grundy moralist, and it's up to women to show the way rather than join in:

It was the great betrayal of the women's movement - diverted to male ends so that young women could be freed to duplicate the boorish behaviour of young men, from driving like hoons to spewing in the gutter after a big night out.

Get thee back to a Jane Austen novel, you raunchy young things. Now how about a full blooded bit of stereotyping?

In recent decades, the brutality of the enterprise has been spun by politicians into a mawkish jingoism. One day, when we have been shaken from this collective reverie, we may find ourselves asking what it means when those who had once pacified the beast have gone off to join it.

Yep, men are beasts, and women are sweet, and now the sweet young things have been traduced by the beasts. Put it another, equally simplistic and shallow, way:

What are little boys made of?
Frogs and snails
And puppy-dogs' tails,
That's what little boys are made of.

What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice
And everything nice,
That's what little girls are made of ...

Yep, in his heart of hearts, Clive is back there with Robert Southey in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

We are all so terrified of being accused of sexism that we refuse to acknowledge that most of us shudder at the thought of women going into battle - to slice bodies with bullets, blow them up with mortars and slit throats when ordered. We do not want to think about women soldiers returning with their faces blown off, for we know we will feel a special kind of guilty revulsion.

Uh huh. Let's put that another way:

We are all so terrified of being accused of sexism that we refuse to acknowledge that most of us shudder at the thought of men going into battle - to slice bodies with bullets, blow them up with mortars and slit throats when ordered. We do not want to think about men soldiers returning with their faces blown off, for we know we will feel a special kind of guilty revulsion.

Well at least the pond would, because if you're going to brood about, and rabbit on about, the futility of war, what's good for the goose is equally good for the gander, and vice versa.

Instead of scribbling offensive twaddle, especially when it conjures up a confining image and a limiting sense of women and what they might do, and what they have already done, and on the historical record at that:

It is not sexist to have these reactions; it is to allow oneself to feel that we are blurring a line between peace and war, and compromising a subtle, civilising power that has always worked to restrain the violent tendencies of men.

Oh spare my sainted aunt.

It's up to women to restrain the violent tendencies of men, rather than men doing the job themselves. Just another burden to add to the burden women have been forced to carry for centuries.

Bugger that for a joke. Clive might think it's okay for men to volunteer and join the military, but not women because they're gentle and sweet and a restraining influence, and not crude or vulgar or boorish like men, but women no longer need his permission or his urging to become heroines in a Jane Austen novel.

That said, the pond likes Jane Austen, and would rather join a tiddly winks club than join the military, and has fastidiously avoided all physical confrontations throughout a sheltered life.

But by golly after reading Clive there was a faint whiff of a desire at the pond to give him a conk on the nose along with verbal advice to HTFU man. Or perhaps STFU as he scribbles about "silent discomfort" at noisy, uncomfortable length ...

Or at least explain to him that women have as much right to enjoy sex and have a good stiff drink as the next man and that equality is better than conforming to Clive's stereotypes and that next week he might pen a piece on why gay men shouldn't belong to the beastly military, and how they should be a restraining influence on barbaric beastly macho men but really enough with the sexist stereotypes already ...

(Below: Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who became the first Soviet citizen to be received by a United States President, courtesy of killing many men ... more here).