Far from a contest of ideas, this campaign withers to irrelevance

For the second time in a dozen years a Coalition government is, according to the polls, facing electoral defeat, easily characterised as “stubborn” and “prejudiced” on key policy issues, a team of (mostly) men of the past, lacking a vision or the policies to back it up.

Where is the contest of ideas? Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten.

It was American statesman and diplomat Adlai Stevenson who remarked in a 1963 address to the UN that “ignorance is stubborn, and prejudice dies hard”. He could well have been describing the Coalition.

Read the opinion piece from The Age by John Hewson - “Far from a contest of ideas, this campaign withers to irrelevance."

The fear that lies behind aggressive masculinity

What strikes me most is the fragility. Gillette makes an advertisement calling on men to challenge abusive behaviour, and thousands furiously proclaim they will never use its products again. The American Psychological Association (APA) issues new clinical guidelines advising that a masculinity characterised by dominance, aggression and emotional repression can be harmful to men’s mental health, and the world’s conservative media falls into a collective faint. So much for the strong and silent types.

 Illustration: Mark Long

If “real men”, according to the men’s rights movement, are tough and commanding, why are the exponents of this doctrine so easily discomposed? Why does the slightest challenge to the norms they proclaim – by a razor ad or an academic body they had probably never encountered before – trigger this frenzied testeria?

Read the option piece on The Guardian by George Monbiot - “The fear that lies behind aggressive masculinity.”