Divorce is painful enough without Bettina Arndt involved
Honours should be reserved for people who make society better. Bettina Arndt has made ours worse with her fatuous ramblings about the workings of family law, writes David Penberthy.
Rendezview
Don't miss out on the headlines from Rendezview. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Bettina Arndt is the lead member of an organisation which I like to call Mad Sheilas Who Hate Feminism But Would Be Unemployed Without It.
There’s a handful of these ladies peddling their wares in the media, popping up with observations about how affirmative action is patronising and unworkable (even though our board rooms and Parliaments remain a sausagefest), that rape claims are often dubious and should therefore be treated with general suspicion, or that sexual harassment was even worse in their day but all a bit of a laugh really, given that a stray hand on the bum has never killed anybody.
The weird thing is if not for the likes of Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem and all those other admirable feminist rabblerousers, women such as Arndt would still be up the back of the newspaper writing Agony Aunt columns or sharing recipes for apricot jam.
Instead, the gains that were made by those provocative and powerful women who were rightly demanding an equal voice and an equal platform, can now be utilised to argue it’s us poor men who are actually being marginalised by the modern day sisterhood.
I am not so politically correct or doctrinaire to argue Bettina Arndt should be formally stripped of the Order of Australia medal that has generated such controversy since being bestowed upon the columnist and sex therapist on Australia Day. I just think she’s a crappy choice.
AOs should be reserved for people who have made our society a better place. She has made ours a worse place by carving out a niche for herself as a divider of genders, not a uniter of them, largely with her fatuous ramblings about the workings of family law.
At her worst, Arndt is a dangerous inflamer of the view that the Family Court is some evil feminist conspiracy and that men are invariably the losers from any divorce settlement. She feeds the darker recesses of what could be described as the Australian men’s movement, some members of which appear to be unhinged.
Clearly, there have been cases where women have exaggerated or indeed fabricated claims of neglect or abuse against their estranged partners for custodial benefits and monetary gain. There would be a fair few blokes who have done the same against their exes, too. And there are probably a few blokes who upon being accused of neglect or abuse will howl to the moon about their innocence, when the truth is they’re just bad blokes who are in denial.
Arndt’s research and journalism takes the minority cases where divorces end particularly badly for men and conflates them to present a misleading but apparently broader truth.
I write this as a divorcee myself who gets on really well with his ex, not through gritted teeth for the good of our kids, but because we still like and respect each other.
I also write this as someone who is friends with other divorced couples who are finding a perfectly civilised and mature way of making their way through life, framed around supporting their children, but also informed by a shared respect for their former partners.
I spoke to a divorced friend about the superb Netflix movie Marriage Story and the wholly relatable way in which it documents the miserable process of the death of a relationship. Divorce is one of the ultimate demonstrations of the maxim that sh-t happens.
Apart from being a handy way to get rid of a few dud friends – those who form a cheer squad for one of you rather than a support group for both of you – there is little to recommend about the process of divorce.
The protagonists in this film are both good people who start off dizzily in love. Their relationship dies from those often small, missable moments, minor disagreements, significant but undetected changes of thought and behaviour that suddenly blow up into something that has acquired an unstoppable power of its own.
The manner in which the film chronicles their marathon, relationship-ending argument, like some wounded animal taking its final breath, is one of the most intense and exhausting scenes I have seen in cinema in ages.
But unlike the crapulous Kramer vs Kramer – the No. 1 entrant in the divorce-as-disaster-movie genre – Marriage Story is an optimistic film which ends on the happily mundane note of these two civilised adults casually agreeing to swap a day so their happily sleeping child can stay over after a Halloween party.
This graceful and intelligent movie is a more accurate depiction of the realities of divorce than the warlike tosh peddled by Bettina.
The statistically flimsy nature of her grand assertions suggests there is little science behind what she writes. Rather, it points to a strange desire to simply be one of the boys, adored as she is by a certain species of elderly Australian chap who thinks his life has been ruined by conniving harpies.
You want your kids to be safe in life. The most horrible thing I have seen from Arndt of late was her recent online teasing of a group of university students who dared to produce a sensibly-worded campus pamphlet that has simple dot points about the questions of consent.
In pithy terms the document says that it’s best to wait for the word “yes” before doing the business. Makes sense to me. Not so to Arndt: “Young women at Griffith University taught to be uncaring, demanding bitches,” she wrote on Twitter about the document.
Quality stuff. To my eyes, the sum total of Arndt’s work seems to be to have made the world less safe for young women and misleadingly hostile and divisive for adults who have been through the wringer of divorce.
It’s an achievement of sorts, I suppose, just not one that merits an AO.
David Penberthy is a columnist for the Adelaide Advertiser.