The ‘Feminists’ Who Call Out Sexism – Except When It’s Politically Inconvenient

We’re all used to his cringeworthy antics, but last month the Australian Prime Minister excelled himself. Watch him here trying out some schoolboy humour at the expense of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.

Asked an innocuous question during a podcast interview about gifts he’d received on his travels, Albo launched into a nudge-nudge-wink-wink routine about the melons Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi had given him — moving cupped hands in front of his chest, in case anyone missed the point. His interviewer, Nikki Osborne, was happy to run with it: “She just came in looking like Pamela Anderson?”

This was all sleazy Albo’s own work — totally unprompted, unlike the Kylie Minogue “shag” line later in the same interview, which at least came off the back of Osborne’s sexy banter. The Kylie line was juicy enough to make headlines from London to Los Angeles.

That’s what should embarrass our media. The Kylie line made the world sit up, yet here was a Prime Minister who self-styles as a feminist ally, choosing to mime a foreign leader’s breasts on camera — a leader who happens to be the head of Government of our most important trading partner. You’d think that would be the story.

It wasn’t. Most of our mainstream media has ignored it entirely.

The reason isn’t hard to find. Albanese is Labour, and most of our media are not so quietly rooting for Labour. So, it turns out the feminist media’s outrage isn’t actually about protecting women — it’s about who’s doing the offending. It’s been left almost entirely to our more conservative media – Sky News and the Australian – to point out the obvious, that a Coalition Prime Minister who mimed a foreign leader’s breasts on camera would have been finished by lunchtime.

What interests me isn’t really the story about melons, or Kylie Minogue, or a PM having a midlife crisis, but rather how ‘believe women’ and ‘call out sexism’ turn out to have an asterisk next to them — * unless it’s politically inconvenient.

That asterisk has shown up everywhere I’ve looked this past month — not only in the reflexive media outrage machine sitting selectively idle when it comes to Albo’s inanities.

There was also Jenna Price’s provocative column in the Sydney Morning Herald entitled: ‘Think the family court is a disaster now? Hanson would make it worse.’ Price, an old-school ranting feminist, seems rattled that Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party is surging in the polls. Hanson is one of the very few politicians in Australia willing to say out loud what feminism has done to our Family Court — where a tsunami of domestic violence allegations is used, mainly by mothers, to gain the upper hand in custody proceedings.

Price is convinced Hanson’s policies would bring “far more stress and pain” for families. Here’s her idea of balanced commentary on the issue: Hanson’s push for equal time with kids, Price writes, “would be fine if they stopped beating the mother of those kids”. Note the “if” — which amounts to an unproven allegation against every father in Australia. That’s not analysis. That’s an insult.

And what’s her evidence for dismissing Hanson’s assertion that domestic violence orders get used tactically to cut fathers out of their kids’ lives? None. Price doesn’t rebut it. She just declares it doesn’t exist — case closed.

While Price was insisting there’s no evidence regarding tactical domestic violence allegations, the Australian was reporting a live story that says otherwise — with journalist Ellie Dudley breaking scoop after scoop, and Janet Albrechtsen adding commentary.

Meet Roger Clisdell, a New South Wales Local Court judge with 18 years on the bench. Hearing a domestic violence matter last year — a father trying to get access to his own children — Clisdell voiced what family lawyers already know: tactical apprehended violence orders (AVOs) were “very common”. This case, he said, had “all the hallmarks of what’s alleged. They’ve separated, they’ve got shared custody and suddenly, she starts saying, ‘Oh, there’s coercive control and I want the children not to go near him.'”

Clisdell heard her evidence — where she admitted “I have no fears of physical harm” — before ruling there wasn’t enough to keep the father away. “These are always difficult situations,” the judge said. Referring to the couple’s earlier shared custody arrangement, he added:

I have got to somehow restore that at this stage because there is no physical threat to the children and though there is some concern about psychological harm, these (interim) orders are primarily designed to provide protection from violence.

For that — for applying the evidence in front of him, carefully, and reaching a considered conclusion — Clisdell had a complaint upheld against him by the New South Wales Judicial Commission. And when the same AVO matter returned to court this year, police withdrew it entirely — whatever ‘evidence’ existed hadn’t survived proper scrutiny.

Clisdell isn’t a one-off. He’s part of a wider pattern in the NSW legal system: judges being quietly punished not for getting the law wrong, but for suggesting that evidence should matter before someone’s life is upended.

Which is exactly why Price can state so emphatically that there’s no evidence — because officially, there isn’t much. Not because tactical AVOs don’t happen, but because our authorities very deliberately choose not to fund the research that would prove it. The Clisdell saga shows precisely why: when a judge with 18 years’ experience says the quiet part out loud, the system’s response isn’t to investigate whether he’s right. It’s to punish him for saying it, in secret, and count on the silence that follows to keep the ‘no evidence’ claim technically true.

Put it all together and a pattern emerges. It’s not that anyone picked up a phone and orchestrated any of this. Nobody needed to. When the people running our media newsrooms and the people running our legal institutions share the same feminist assumptions — that women don’t lie, that every allegation deserves belief, that scepticism itself is the real danger — they don’t need a conspiracy to arrive at the same destination. They just need to keep looking away from anything that complicates the story. And by that measure, they’re doing a remarkably good job.

Most of the media manipulation I’ve been describing pushes the same subtext: men are dangerous. That’s what worries me — not the individual stories, but the effect. Women absorb this stuff day after day, story after story, until ‘women good, men bad’ stops being a media reflex and becomes how they actually see the man standing in front of them.

Witness the ‘man versus bear’ debate that went viral last year — women were asked whether they’d rather be stuck in a forest with a strange man or a bear, and most of them picked the bear. It’s pretty funny as a thought experiment. Considerably less funny once you watch that same instinct show up in real life, shaping how a woman reacts to an actual roadside rescue.

Which brings me to a recent ABC story promoted as a “terrifying roadside assistance ordeal!” It involved a young woman driving in the country whose car broke down and she called for help. A contractor turned up in an unmarked car — routine enough, given that her roadside assistance firm, the NRMA, regularly subcontracts to cover rural areas when it doesn’t have its own people nearby.

Yet the ABC reported her terror as self-evidently reasonable, and the resulting push to force NRMA contractors into uniforms and carrying ID as an unambiguous win. Nobody paused to ask about the bloke on the other end of that unmarked car: out on the road late at night, in whatever miserable weather, doing a helpful job — and greeted as if he was the bear.

That’s why these stories matter. The selective outrage, the buried evidence, the silenced judges — all in service of protecting the feminist narrative, not the truth. And that needs calling out. Loudly.

As one of Australia’s first sex therapists, Bettina Arndt began her career discussing sex on television and training doctors and other professionals in sexual counselling at a time when such topics were largely taboo. Her current – and even more socially unacceptable – passion is exposing Australia’s unfair treatment of men through the relentless weaponisation of laws and policies that portray women solely as victims. Her decades of advocacy for fair treatment of men in the Family Court included serving on key government inquiries. Bettina makes YouTube videos and blogs on Substack.