I tell you, it's a minefield out there

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, July 12.)

We lead sheltered lives out here in the provinces. Until recently, for example, I’d never heard of a terf.

You hadn’t either? Allow me to explain. A terf is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist.We have TVNZ’s excellent Q+A programme to thank for bringing us up to speed with this latest acronym from the culture wars.

Q+A ran a fascinating item two Sundays ago about a trans-gender person from Wellington who identifies as a woman but was denied membership of a women-only gym because the gym insisted on proof  of gender re-assignment surgery.

According to Q+A, gym staff were subsequently abused online and in person, presumably by supporters of the trans-gender cause. I felt sorry for the trans person at the centre of the debate, who clearly didn’t relish being implicated in such unpleasantness.

The bigger picture here is that society is suddenly expected to remould itself to accommodate gender variations that were unheard of a few years ago. In the process, a schism has opened up between trans-gender people and orthodox feminists. This is what happens when society gets fragmented and polarised by identity politics.

We got advance warning of this three years ago when the doughty feminist warrior Germaine Greer caused an uproar by asserting that trans people were only pretend women. Since then, hostilities have escalated.

In Britain, militant trans activists and terfs have angrily confronted each over a proposed law change that would allow people to “self-identify” their gender.

Trans people assert that if you regard yourself as a certain gender, regardless of the bits you were born with, that’s it; end of story. The trans activists don’t even like hearing reference to vaginas, because that excludes “women” who don’t have them.

The terfs, meanwhile, are determined to protect the notion of womanhood because they see it as underpinning all that feminists stand for. They are also a bit iffy, perhaps understandably, about sharing women-only spaces with people who may be biologically male.

It’s a deliciously exquisite socio-cultural-ideological war. If you wanted to be mischievous you could characterise it as a contest over which faction considers itself the more grievously discriminated against. But that would be flippant, and flippancy is not permitted in the gender wars.

National Party leader Simon Bridges learned this to his cost when he allowed himself to be lured into a trap during a chat on Radio Hauraki, which specialises in blokey flippancy,about whether Jacinda Ardern’s baby should be regarded as gender-fluid.

Predictably, Bridges was savaged in social media for playing along with the joke. Humour, traditionally a safety valve for easing social tensions, is suddenly verboten.

Fragile sensibilities are waiting to be bruised everywhere you turn. Just by placing inverted commas around that word “women” earlier in this column, and thereby highlighting the rather ambiguous status of some people who use that term to describe themselves, I risk being branded as transphobic.

You can add this hyperbolic word to the ever-growing list of pejorative terms – homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, racist, misogynistic – that are used to disparage anyone who isn’t nimble-footed enough to keep up with the constantly shifting battle lines in the culture wars.

I tell you, it’s a minefield out there. Decline to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple because same-sex marriage is against your beliefs, as the woman owner of a bakery in Warkworth did recently, and no matter how painfully polite your refusal, you’ll be pilloried on social media.

Let me make a wild guess here and speculate that many of the people who burned with rage over the baker’s refusal of service to the lesbian couple would have deliriously applauded the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia for humiliating Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, by asking her to leave on a recent Friday night.

Am I missing something, or are there two different rules in play here?

Fortunately, out here in the provinces, we’re largely oblivious to the myriad anxieties and resentments that seem to beset politically aware Wellington. Most of the people I meet strike me as being inexplicably content with life in one the world’s most liberal and tolerant democracies. The preoccupation with perceived injustices seems very much an inner-city metropolitan phenomenon.

We can’t help but be aware of them, of course. Day after day, the media bombard us with laments from a plethora of advocacy groups listing the innumerable ways in which society is failing to satisfy the needs of disadvantaged minorities. New categories of human rights pop up overnight like mushrooms.

But the urban social justice crusaders will just have to be patient and give us provincial yokels time. When age-old certainties are being constantly subverted and the ideological ground keeps shifting under us like tectonic plates, it can be hard to keep up.

Men behaving badly

(First published in the Dominion Post, September 16.)

I’ve never cared much for David Cunliffe, but I felt some sympathy for him back in 2014 when, as Labour Party leader, he made his apology for being a man.

Cunliffe copped a lot of stick for that. According to some commentators, the howls of condemnation were a factor in Labour’s decision to dump him as leader.

But really, what was so wrong about what he said? Cunliffe was talking about sexual abuse and family violence, which he correctly described as being overwhelmingly perpetrated by men. He talked about the “deep-seated sexism” still prevalent in New Zealand.

Okay, he may have been trying to ingratiate himself with the feminist lobby. But if he was saying that he sometimes felt ashamed when he saw how other men behaved … well, I do, too.

Example one: Bill Cosby. He could have occupied a place of honour in American entertainment history as the first black male to play a leading role in a prime-time TV series (I Spy). Instead he will be remembered for accusations that he was a serial sexual assaulter of attractive young women.

The evidence against Cosby is compelling. He thought those women were fair game and relied on his star appeal to draw them into his web.

Example two: Roger Ailes.  Ailes, the former boss of Fox News, is a fat old man. It’s hard to imagine any woman finding him sexually attractive. But he’s a powerful fat old man, and he used his power to try to get women into bed with him.

Ailes pressed news anchor Gretchen Carlson to have sex with him and when she refused, he sabotaged her career. He called her a man-hater who needed to learn how to “get on with the boys”.  But the former Miss America bit back and Ailes ended up being fired by Fox News, which paid Carlson $US20 million (a preposterous sum, but that’s America for you) in compensation.

Example three: The Chiefs. The Hamilton-based Super Rugby team would surely recognise the phrase “getting on with the boys”. Being one of the boys is a familiar phenomenon in male sport. It’s an excuse for never having to grow up and for boorish behaviour under the guise of a primitive ritual known as male bonding.

The Chiefs were being boys when they had their “Mad Monday” at Okoroire Springs Hotel and invited a stripper whom they allegedly pawed and sexually propositioned.

You probably thought, as I did, that rugby players acting like dogs on heat were something from the 1970s. Apparently not.

Mind you, Scarlette the stripper isn’t blameless. In fact she’s part of the problem. By buying into that leering, blokey male culture, she encourages men to regard women as playthings for their pleasure. 

You have to wonder where the past few decades have gone. Feminism was supposed to make men aware of women’s right to be treated with respect, but somewhere along the line things went badly askew.

Which brings me to example four: The infamous Roast Busters. Bad behaviour by older men might be explained as the result of lingering attitudes from an era when people knew no better, but here were male teenagers from middle-class Auckland suburbs playing out the same ugly old pattern.

Oh, I almost forgot Colin Craig. If evidence in recent defamation proceedings is to be believed, even gawky, supposedly pious family men can’t help pressing their attentions on women when the adrenalin of politics gives them delusions of sexual irresistibility.

The sense of male sexual entitlement is endemic. Many of us know of women who have been raped and remained silent. They may not have been bashed into submission, but they were raped nonetheless.

In a newspaper column earlier this year, the singer Lizzie Marvelly graphically described the sexual harassment she had endured from men in the music business. She said it was like a cancer in the industry.

I admit I don’t understand this. What possible pleasure can a man get from having sex with a woman who makes it plain she doesn’t want it and isn’t enjoying it?

If sex is supposed to be about the mutual giving of pleasure between consenting partners, then sex as a result of coercion isn’t sex at all. The feminists are right on this point: it’s really about men enjoying power over women.

So yes, when I read about sexual predators, I’m ashamed too. I may not be responsible for what these men did, but that doesn’t stop me feeling tarnished by association.

It's Kevin Roberts' turn to be thrown to the wolves

I’m no fan of Kevin Roberts. He’s a tireless self-promoter whose talent for bullshit is breathtaking even by advertising industry standards. But the extraordinary furore over his comments on gender diversity illustrates the dangerous extent to which business is now held hostage by the po-faced forces of political correctness.

Roberts, the executive chairman of Saatchi and Saatchi, has been asked to take leave of absence for saying, in quite mild and unexceptionable terms, that the debate over gender diversity in the advertising business is over.

It seems that in business these days, you’re allowed to express an opinion only if it’s the right one.

We know that the enforcers of political correctness are intolerant of any departure from ideological orthodoxy. That’s been the case for a long time. What’s relatively new, and frightening, is that business leaders are now so intimidated that they capitulate without firing a shot.  

The lesson is clear. Roberts has been hung out to dry as a lesson to anyone else who might be tempted to express a legitimate opinion. And there’s another, even more potent, lesson here: no one is too big to be safe. Even Roberts’ rarefied status in the advertising world wasn’t enough to protect him once the Harpies had him in their sights.

Loyalty? Forget about it.

The irony is that Roberts may not have been downplaying women’s legitimate career ambitions at all, but instead was wondering aloud whether there were better options for women than relentlessly pursuing advancement as men do. That was the interpretation placed on his remarks in a discussion (between women, as it happened) that I heard on the BBC.

Not that it matters. Men are not permitted to discuss such things. As columnist Grace Dent put it in Britain’s Independent, Roberts has been escorted to “Shamed Man Gulag #231, policed by a number of perma-furious turquoise-haired fourth-wave feminists”.

New Zealanders should recognise this pattern of events, because we’ve been here before. In 2011, Northern Employers and Manufacturers Association head Alasdair Thompson was publicly crucified for suggesting that menstruation caused women to take sick leave. Shamefully, he lost his job as a result. 

Thompson was thrown to the wolves by the very people who should have supported him and now Roberts has suffered a similar fate. Clearly, no one should expect the gutless business sector to stand up for people’s right to free speech.