Hi Warwick,

I found the bit about women living 3.4 years longer than men interesting. There's been talk recently about raising the retirement age to 70. Surely, with women living longer than men, working less, and taking longer out of the workforce than men, we should be discussing raising the female retirement age to 70. That would give women time to catch up for the extra sick leave they take over lifetime too. I'm sure all our feminist friends interested in 'equal outcomes' would agree.

Killarney,

Women just do things so much better than men. If only we could return to that Golden Age in Australia's history when women like Gillard ruled, and the handbag hit squad were ready to strike down any mere males who dared to raise their voices.

Ah, those were the days. Gillard, Wong, Plibersek, Roxen...We hadn't seen women of their caliber since Kernot, Nixon and, Kirner. As that other great Australian woman Dame Edna would say, every one of them precious. I myself would humbly add, every one them worth a billion dollars, or in Gillards case, about 400 billion.

Actually, dane, that '3.4' years figure is a mathematical average caused in large part by the fact that so many YOUNG men wipe themselves out early on in motor accidents, suicides and other general violent and criminal behaviour.

What you're suggesting is that older women should be penalised with a later retirement age because younger men can't control their raging testosterone, or macho egos, or whatever it is that makes them behave so dangerously.

Ignoring for a moment the sniping of the women-haters, Warwick Marsh, (what are they afraid of, I wonder?), I was making an impartial observation on the evidence you were using to make your point.

Marketing agencies such as M&CSaatchi conduct these surveys with a single purpose in mind: to identify the psychological traits in their target audience, the better to exploit these in order to sell a product.

To somehow transform this into a piece that supports your particular movement is just another example of marketing in action; the two agendas, yours and M&CSaatchi are so very far removed from each other.

It is just possible that their findings mesh with your perceptions of your collective selves. But frankly, I don't see this as a good thing at all, especially if it motivates you to call for government intervention in the form of positive discrimination. It might actually be preferable to find a survey that actually challenges that inclination towards dependency, and instead encourages self-reliance.

Or at the very least, a greater level of group-based interdependence - along the lines that have so well served women's refuges, perhaps.

Good article.

The damage done to the cultural and intellectual climate by feminists probably can never be repaired. Reinterpreting history where males were no more than power hungry dictators who treated women and children as slaves has done enormous intellectual and cultural damage. It takes a lot of hate to reinterpret thousands of years of history and condemn entirely one sex or "gender" for all the world's problems.

The good news is that feminism is easily defeated. Their reinterpretation of history comes from the Foucauldian and neo-Marxists who reduce all phenomena to power relations. Power relations as the archetype paradigm to interpret the world only becomes fashionable around the 1960s. It existed in various forms before that but doesn't take complete hold until the radicals took over the academe in the 1960s. The main problem is that, this new reinterpretation does not actually examine past cultures in depth to see what morals and values actually existed, and why they existed, like a professional anthropologists would. Feminist deconstructionism wipes out all actual history and replaces it with "power structures". What's even more sad is that this is one of the dominant theories perpetuated in the academe today. Students are coming out of the academe with these idiotic ideas of "oppression", that doesn't accurately portray how cultures operated and why they operated as they did.

There's much work to be done here. Conservatives and (classical) liberals must keep up the pressure on "progressives" everywhere. They must make their faulty logic accountable. They must be exposed as the frauds and intellectual charlatans they are.

Killarney, do you think it's ok for men to be deprived of their children. I'm not sure you would be so happy though if fathers gained custody in 80-90% of cases, that would be different wouldn't it ?. Whether you like it or not, even you cannot deny history. The patriarchal system which you seem to allude to has seen our species become the dominant (if not necessarily most intelligent)life form on the planet.
Excellent article Warwick. I fought for 3 years in the family court for my daughter. Despite all that time, a mountain of evidence of abuse and neglect and many thousands of dollars spent (no doubt people like Killarney would be pleased that the abuser of my child got all the free legal aid) it was not enough. In the end I did get custody but only because my brave little daughter voted with her feet late one night, shoved down their throats what I had been telling them for so long, and ultimately SHAMED the bastards into doing something.
My daughter was in a parlous state when I gained custody, unable to do basic tasks like shower herself, wash her hair or even tell the time (they teach that in playschool) underweight and in poor health, unable to read or write even basic words, unable to do basic maths not even any of her times tables. A few weeks after she came into my care she did the year 3 basic skills test at her school. She finished in the Bottom grade in every aspect of that test, pretty much bottom in the school and was placed in the special needs class (no doubt you would be happy about that Killarney, after all she was with her mother). She was 8/9 yo. This was the Broken child I was given courtesy of her mother and our so called family law system which placed absolutely no value on a fathers love for his child. I was to spend the better part of the next 5-10 years repairing the damage done to my child.