Successful, independent women: enough to drive the sisterhood mad

SOMETHING has gone dreadfully wrong with debate in this country. The gloves are off. In some sectors of the media it is now acceptable to mock, demean, and ridicule certain, select women. Sadly, these character assassinations are mostly being carried out by other women.

Why is it amusing to treat Gina Rinehart as a target for appalling derision? When ABC1's Q&A program went to air last week, Rinehart was ridiculed for her greed, her appearance -- why can't she afford to visit a hairdresser? -- her treatment of her family, her business motives and so on.

Host Tony Jones allowed his panel to continue to disparage Rinehart in a manner he would never tolerate if the target had been left-wing women, particularly his favoured, female comrades. You know the ones, Tony's Angels: Sarah Hanson-Young, Penny Wong, Tanya Plibersek, Nicola Roxon and so on.

The audience laughter will be used to justify this unfair treatment. Can't you take a joke? But the laughter from Q&A's inner-city audience simply reinforced the double standards among so-called progressives because, let's be clear, the treatment of Rinehart is ideological. A high profile, left-wing woman would never have received the same uncensored, sneering criticism.

However flawed Rinehart's character, she deserves factually accurate commentary and recognition of her contribution to Australia's future prosperity. Naturally, the feral left-wing critics refuse to acknowledge that Rinehart's $9.5 billion Roy Hill project will create thousands of Australian jobs.

Nor are they willing to celebrate the fact that Australia is now home to the world's richest woman -- the sisterhood is strangely silent on this achievement. Serious debate? Civil conversation? Not when the subject is someone like Rinehart.

Social commentator and best-selling author Bettina Arndt attracts even more poisonous venom. She is presently the subject of a growing tirade of public abuse, with personal attacks appearing whenever she is published. Again, the reason is pure ideology but this time the fault lines stem from sexual and gender issues.

It has become orthodoxy among Arndt-haters that because she writes often about men, she must be anti-women. Her sympathetic discussion of men's views about sex and gender relations are regularly attacked by female journalists and bloggers, who sneeringly dissect her articles, line by line. Often their nasty, rambling responses are as irrational as they are inarticulate.

Arndt writes that she is drawn to writing about men's perspective on these issues because "the constant attacks on men has meant they have dropped out of the cultural dialogue".

That's a great shame, she says, because talking about heterosexual relations without hearing men's views is surely nonsensical.

Arndt has always been attracted to issues deemed unmentionable by cultural gatekeepers. Thirty-five years ago, sex was the taboo subject. As editor of Forum, she challenged that orthodoxy. Talking openly -- and graphically -- about sex earned her a two-year ban from live television and radio by the Broadcasting Control Board.

She now argues that with women dominating public discussion of gender and sexual issues, men's views are being silenced.

As Arndt wrote in her best-selling book, The Sex Diaries: "while the focus there was on mismatched desire, I quickly learnt there was so much more that men wanted to talk about. Their diaries overflowed with their thoughts and feelings about what it means to be a sexual male at this point in our cultural history.

"They wanted to talk not just about desire but about other aspects of their sexuality: their craving for intimacy, their delight in her pleasure, their fears and tensions, secret cravings, their bodies, erections, orgasms.

"And with so many couples struggling with tensions over sex, the men wanted to explain to women why it all matters so much to them."

Like the prudish censors who banned her in 1972, there is an entire industry of women determined to shut down Arndt by deriding her, often without even reading her commentaries.

"You're giving oxygen to Bettina Arndt? Why?" asked a reader of Wendy Harmer's website, The Hoopla, responding to Arndt's role in a new dating project being run on the site.

Like Rinehart, Arndt is treated as fair game for the most irrational, offensive attacks, like calling her a "rape cheerleader", an "evil gender traitor" who needs a "slap on the head".

Her critics delight in complaining about the chore of even reading what she has to say: "I stomped my feet intermittently, growled a little, turned away in frustration."

How about this intellectual response to a recent Arndt article from the National Union of Students Women's Department: "Please stop a moment while I vomit all over the women's laptop."

Catherine Deveny, sacked by The Age for her offensive tweets, recently offered 10 pages of unreadable tripe as a supposed satire on Arndt's work. The anonymity of social media has ramped up the vulgarity aimed at Arndt.

The Arndt-haters cannot bear to hear her assertion that it is not rational for women to expect to live in a monogamous marriage while denying their husbands sex.

How dare Arndt suggest women say "yes" more often to address sexual tensions in a marriage? Nor do successful professional women want to hear their market value drops if they wait until their 30s to get serious about finding a partner. For many of Arndt's female critics, common sense seems to grate like manicured nails on a chalkboard.

Earlier this year Arndt wrote a piece suggesting that many women who dress provocatively bristle "if the wrong man shows he enjoys the display". She explored the confusion that reigns among many men in this situation, especially those who know the unclad bounty is not intended for them.

The attacks aimed at Arndt in the huge debate that followed were beyond the pale. What does it say about gender relations in this country if defending men attracts such ferocious animosity?

"Sometimes you gotta wonder if Bettina even likes women." That's the stock standard, anti-intellectual response even from those who offer up begrudging support.

In fact, Arndt has spent much of her working life writing for women even though her articles about men attract all the attention. On Harmer's The Hoopla website, Arndt, a former clinical psychologist and sex therapist, is offering advice to three women using internet dating to find themselves a man. Now won't that drive her critics nuts?

This is not one of those vacuous calls for civility usually trotted out by those trying to avoid scrutiny. Arndt is tough and unafraid of robust debate. But reading the latest ridiculously offensive responses to her, one is left with the overwhelming sense that the women who hate her most are the women most in need of her advice.