fifteen minutes of flame

Sorry, Piers Akerman, it wasn't an hour, it was fifteen minutes, according to the owner of the strip joint. At worst, Rudd was "a little rowdy" and "uppity". And Janet Albrechtsen, sorry but you're wrong, too.

Had Tony Abbott taken a detour to the Pink Pussycat one evening, I’m betting that the Labor Party sisterhood would be hissing for his resignation. Likewise if Alexander Downer or John Howard were caught on a pleasant UN tour of duty at Scores, we could expect howls of feminist derision.

Frankly, my dear, I wouldn't give a damn if they did. I have no interest in the sex lives of politicians. The issue would be one of hypocrisy, the gulf between what the conservatives say and what they do, and not of "male exploitation of poor working girls". It wouldn't be a feminist issue but a general political one.
Feminists are 'silent' on this issue (if we are) not because we support Labor policies. I'd suggest we're 'silent' because among consenting adults, we have no problem with a little female nudity, or with women who choose to work as strippers and/or sex workers. Feminists respect women's choices. This is not the Victorian era, and provided there was no exploitation involved, I don't regard this as a feminist issue.
And something I've been wondering about lately. Over the past few years we've been incessantly told by the Right that Howard's long reign means most Australians are conservative. They based this idea on the fact that just over half of the people voted Liberal and extrapolated from this that the minority Left was criticising the Australian people generally whenever it criticised the Howard government. So, now that polls are showing that the majority of people are progressive, can we preach to the Right that to criticise progressives is to criticise the Australian people as a whole?

conservative paranoia

Miranda Devine has made some preposterous arguments in her time, but her column last Sunday stands out as particularly stupid. She manages to turn public reaction in the JonBenet Ramsey case into a massive liberal conspiracy:

"There is a readiness, which has emerged in recent decades, to believe the worst of a seemingly model nuclear family and a desire to ferret out dark secrets. It is part of a move to undermine the concept of the nuclear family as the basis of social stability, and to strip it of its relative superiority as a vehicle for bringing up children and keeping them safe."

This is despite her earlier acknowledgment that,

"It was the fact that her parents had displayed her so obscenely like a mini-adult that first made them suspects."

But even if Devine is right and ordinary people's natural unease at the exploitation of a child is actually a secret left-wing push to kill off the nuclear family, it's interesting to note that this is despite ten years of conservative government in this country. So Devine reckons the public is dangerously liberal? Does that tell her something about how out-of-touch conservatives are from mainstream values?
But let's think about Devine's statement some more. So the "public", brainwashed by evil leftwing media of course, is against the concept of the nuclear family. In a country with rising marriage and fertility rates, does that ring true?
I wonder what Devine even means by "nuclear family". The patriarchal family structure with father as breadwinner and mother as housewife? (Then it must be feminists encouraging the public to kill off the nuclear family!) Or is she against blended or sole parent families? Or is she fearful of homosexual family units? That's the funny thing: even gays want to be nuclear.
Given that the majority of people are heterosexual and have a biological imperative to form unions and bear children, whether such unions are formalised by law in marriage or not, I don't see the nuclear family disappearing anytime soon. All I see is a conservative writer panicking because she senses that ordinary people have far more tolerant attitudes (in relation to the concept of 'family') than she would hope. And sorry, Miranda, but intelligent people don't regard the Ramseys as a model of great parenting. The public's issue with the Ramseys was their culpability in allowing the sexualisation of their child. Whether they were a nuclear unit or not is completely irrelevant.