The Conservative Party has asserted since its foundation that Political Correctness is Destroying Australia.
Kevin Donnelly, a senior research fellow at the Australian Catholic University, writes in today’s The Australian:
“Thank you, Meryl Streep, and no wonder countless men around the world are singing your praise. When speaking last week at an event to launch the new series of Big Little Lies, Streep made herself a target for the sisterhood by suggesting the label “toxic masculinity” unfairly disparaged men and boys.
“We have our good angles and we have our bad ones,” she said. “I think the labels are less helpful than what we’re trying to get to, which is a communication, direct, between human beings. We’re all on the boat together. We’ve got to make it work.”
And it’s not just Streep, as American feminist Camille Paglia makes the same point while arguing the politically correct label demonstrates a “peevish, grudging rancour against men” where “men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment”.
Paglia goes on to argue in Free Women, Free Men: “Feminist theory has been grotesquely unfair to men in refusing to acknowledge the enormous care that most men have provided to women and children.”
Australia’s Bettina Arndt in her book #MenToo also rails against what she describes as the unfair “demonisation of men” by radical feminists convinced that all men are inherently misogynist and violent towards women.
As a child I had to stand by helplessly watching my mother being physically assaulted by a cruel and violent husband, so I’m the first to admit that violence against women is totally unacceptable and an issue that must be addressed.
There is no worse crime than violating a woman, and any man involved is guilty of a heinous and unforgivable sin. At the same time, man-shaming is unfair and counterproductive as it falls into the politically correct trap of portraying all men as a threat and all women as victims.
Such is the power of the PC movement and the pressure to conform to cultural-left groupthink that even men are joining the sisterhood in its fatwa against masculinity and manhood.
In response to the appalling and distressing death of Courtney Herron in Melbourne, Victoria Police Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius appeared to suggest all men were guilty, saying: “Every time I hear about a woman being attacked – for me as a man – it gives me some pause for reflection about what it is in our community that makes men think it’s OK to attack women.” And: “The key point is (that) this is men’s behaviour, it’s not about women’s behaviour.”
Suggesting collective male responsibility for a crime allegedly carried out by one deranged individual not only lacks reason, it is also symptomatic of how those in positions of authority now virtue-signal to gain acceptance.
Instead of stereotyping men as dangerous and painting society as misogynist, it is far better to accept that women and men are uniquely different and that it is wrong to stigmatise either.
As Paglia argues, “freedom in the gender realm means the freedom of each sex to define its history and destiny without blame or harassment. If women seek freedom, they must let men be free.”
A good place to start would be robust scrutiny of school programs such as Respectful Relationships being implemented across Australia that teach children gender and sexuality are social constructs and that masculinity is inherently violent.”
