Tony Abbott - The Fumbling Feminist?

OK – the whole ‘ virginity is the greatest gift’ thing is a bit old fashioned – everyone knows you can’t go past new socks and jocks and the promise to be nice for 5 concurrent weeks to make a man in a relationship feel really special, but is Tony really telling women how to behave, Julia? Or is Tony actually inadvertently telling us something about blokes that girls and women – of a certain impressionable age – should listen to?

Lets not ignore the bigger issue of self esteem and body image that plagues young women – and if plastic surgeons and researchers are to be believed – young men today. If that’s all not tied up with sex and feeling inadequate then put me on the cover of marie claire and call me Jennifer Hawkins. Maybe Tony Abbott is talking about getting involved in sex too quick, and mistaking raging hormones for full blown love, but hasn’t learned to secularize his argument. Lets face it, religion was the first draft of the law. Like the first draft of TV, it came in Black and White. Law was invented to cope with the coloured and grey bits of life. We just need to get T. Abbott a moral set top box, and maybe he’d get his message through without everyone going digital on him first.

The last conversation I had with a teenage girl about sex stuff told me more about colours of the rainbow than a packet of Derwents. It told me about parties whereby boys competed with each other – to collect all the lipsticked colours of the rainbow on their love swords. The girls feel pressured, not only to waer lipsticks that just mightn’t suit, but to participate. They must. There’s no question of reciprocation in any of this. Anyone who thinks just idly licking a young boys penis purely for his pleasure is the essence of liberation for young women is moonlighting as the letter writer in the front pages of Penthouse. Either that or they secretly hate men, have just been fitted with braces and have a bit of a nasty streak.

I shared my thoughts with my young friend( with 30 years of hindsight) on the difference between boys and girls when it comes to sex at fourteen. I still honestly believe girls think it’s all tied in with romance and love. You don’t have to be married, you don’t have to be celibate. But you want to feel something authentic. And at least friendly. For boys, I think its more momentary. Really hormonal rather than emotional. Like ‘My penis has to explode and will do so in my sleep if I can’t get you to touch, lick, pull or take it inside you.’ Once it goes off, boys can make a more reasoned decision about whether they like a girl, really. And I reckon with girls it’s the other way around. They want to feel something emotional first. Now at no stage is this an argument to abrogate boys from responsibility of consensual contact. Just because your penis is hard, doesn’t mean your ears are blocked and can’t hear the world ‘No’. I’m just saying that biologically, sexual, hormonal and therefore emotional urges are different between the sexes. Which is something that early feminism, the ones us chicks of the 70’s and 80’s absorbed, distorted. Because equal rights – judicial, matrimonial, financial, economic, career, political - were extrapolated to mean ‘the same as’ – as in the same emotional responses, needs, thought patterns, hormones. And its become so clear over the last few decades that men and women are not. The same, that is. We are oh so very different. Why else would God have invented Top Gear AND Oprah? We are so very different.

Maybe what Tony Abbott is trying to say to his daughters is not to confuse early sex with lasting intimacy. That to get too involved too early may distract you from your main game –education, career, your own advancement and personal growth. That sex for teenage guys may mean a different thing than sex for a teenage girl. You don’t have to be Catholic to be cluey. And that if you just want to go and have sex, enjoy it and not have it mean anything – know that that’s why you are doing it, with no strings attached. But I don’t think any Dad of T. Abbott’s age will actually say that to his teenage daughter, even that’s the truth that dwells in the dark satin sheeted chamber of his heart. Every emancipated woman in her 40’s would like her younger sisters to understand her value in the world ain’t determined by her f***ckability, as dictated by the outside world. Is there anything so wrong with a dad amplfing that, in his fumbling way?

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