For Donald Horne, with love and regret
The political right, patriarchy, and the politics of penetration
Six long months ago, when political staffer Brittany Higgins went public with her account of rape, cover-up and ostracism inside Australia’s Parliament House, the nation was shocked. Australian women, though, felt a familiar unease. A tiresomely persistent problem—often dismissed as men, but right now let’s be fairer and more exact: we mean their sexist system of societal management/control and its various loyalists; so, patriarchy—was again making itself felt. Against the tide of feminism, against equal opportunity legislation and workforce participation and consent education and gender fluidity and all the incremental advances of recent decades, the indefatigable phallus—the thrust of men’s power—was building to a new head.
Two weeks later, when the federal Attorney-General stood accused of a different, horrifyingly vicious rape—that is, of the deliberate and brutal destruction of a rival back when he was a teenager—along with a history of bad behaviour with women pretty much ever since, we were just beginning to learn how thoroughly—well, fucked—things actually are.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, patriarchy has been on the rise across the west for at least twenty years, promoted by oligarchs of the global and regional economies and their allies in conservative politics. Don’t be fooled by the growing presence of women in public life: in recent decades, patriarchy has modified. Forced to concede, it allows women in variable numbers to play the (economic) game it built. It has even allowed, here and there, some changes to the game’s rules to accommodate female (and other) operational difference. What it does not allow—what it apparently will not countenance—is a different and less destructive game.
Forced to concede, patriarchy has modified
On the decline after the postwar social revolution, patriarchy resurged in Australia in the late 1990s, when John Howard so astutely tapped the power pipeline that Rupert Murdoch laid from him to George Bush and friends. There was a brief interval afterwards when the populace rebelled and forced a shaky centre-left government, including an even briefer interval with our first female prime minister, but that didn’t turn the tide. It was Julia Gillard’s bad luck—and very much Australia’s—that the Opposition Leader of the time was a pugilistic Jesuit with a more-or-less-covert passion for the subordination of women, an arsenal of dirty tricks to coerce and compel it, and the shamefully uncritical backing of the media.
The lamentable—nay, embarrassing—state of gender relations in Australia is hardly news. Actually, it’s news when a woman rebels: when Higgins went public; when Gillard burned the Mad Monk with her incandescent misogyny speech. The spontaneous, articulate fury of that riposte lit up screens around the world, but in Australia even reputable journalists—even reputable women journalists—professed not to understand what the prime minister was talking about, and chided her, from behind the opposition leader, for “playing the gender card”. Such is the grip conservative oligarchs have on our politics, our media and, until recently, our national conversation.
But, rhetoric aside, credible accusations of actual rape by Parliamentarians and their staff (here or elsewhere) are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the misogyny of modern conservatism. It’s time we looked more squarely at this load-bearing pillar of the right-wing platform.
Across the “west” (including us here in the remote south-east), conservatives—forced by twentieth-century cultural change to accept more women in public life—are fighting back: reasserting masculine dominance and the right to violence, defunding childcare, limiting men’s liability for sexual assault, threatening the right to abortion. All tangled up with men’s yearning for self-justification, control of women’s bodies is patriarchy’s central project. Perfect control would bring perfect oneness, perfect invulnerability, right? Who knows, perhaps even immortality… illusions maintained by ego, ignorance, faith, and violence.
In Australia (dramatic though it may sound), this mad ideology, this megalomaniacal slippage between the opportunistic, the political and the pseudo-religious, underpins Liberal-National Coalition policy-making, as well as individual politicians’ behaviour. The Chaser’s list of 124 dodgy decisions is already well out of date; the Morrison government enjoys rorting, cavorting and profiteering on a scale surely unseen since the Rum Corps. Crikey media has covered its cavalcade of corruption and made glancing reference to the corporate alliances and constitutional weaknesses that allowed this crisis of democracy to happen and will likely allow it to continue… unless and until social media and a decentralised communications system—and/or any of the other potential disrupters on the horizon—somehow force a dramatic redistribution of power.
Because, heaven knows, the electoral system isn’t delivering able governance. Australia is fumbling its vaccine delivery, shafting the poor, bribing the wealthy, burning its inheritance, and generally doing everything a nation can to escalate its own environmental collapse and cheer on the global Sixth Major Extinction Event. Between the paroxysms of a damaged environment and the pitfalls of our own stupid folly, we stumble on in a haze of exercise apps and tabloid television. Even before the pandemic, Australians were reeling from the impact of droughts, floods, bushfires, vermin plagues, soil depletion, industrial pollution, unregulated development, and the obliteration of ancient sacred sites. That’s just our environmental problems; I haven’t started on the social, the economic, the ideological. This is why capitalist democracy—the imported system of governance that built this nation—is faltering: because for some time now none of its solutions to any of these self-induced crises have been effective.
Don’t expect the system to self-correct, either: democracy is a patch, a modification to ensure the survival of imperialism; it cannot take us where the people are demanding—all the way to its own professed ideals. We need a more radical restructuring: we need to decolonise, decapitalise, and reorganise. Unless I’m much mistaken, that will be impossible until current power structures are closer to complete collapse; in other words, things will get worse before they get better. But if they are to get better, we need a plan. If Australia is to save itself, we need a firm, friendly, feminist, First-Nations-led revolution.
Decolonise, decapitalise, reorganise
We—Australia—have no nation without land, stolen though it is. It is crucial and urgent that we turn to it—and to the people who know it best—with new humility. We have squandered this continent’s riches, failing to perceive value in anything other than what we brought with us, or what lay underground—pursuit of each of which has devastated what was here, the ecosystem we still depend on. And we’ve done this, generation after generation, in the face of an ancient society we refused to see; a complex, non-centralised civilisation that knew the place and the role and the value of every sacred, single thing on this land—a biosphere it had learned and storied and harvested and tended for sixty thousand years.
This, then, is Australia’s patriarchal politics of penetration, courtesy of a bunch of media and mining magnates, the religious right, and the Liberal-National Coalition: fuck the First Nations, fuck the environment, fuck the poor and most especially fuck the disabled; fuck the sick, fuck the foreign and first and fucking foremost, fuck fucking women! Make it a festival of fucking, make the fucking fucking fatal; make ruination erotic: swallow it, bitch, you’re done. Patriarchy—it’s hot. It’s pounding on your door. And it cannot tell desire from destruction.