The very strange case of Bettina Arndt

With the completely ridiculous Right wing trolling that was Bettina Arndt getting an Australia Day award for helping gender equity, there has been a surge of renewed interest in her dubious career.

New Matilda.com reported on the way she has, for decades now, never corrected any publication, interviewer or media outlet which gave her credentials as "psychologist" or "clinical psychologist".  (Or even "Dr", apparently.)    It had actually been my understanding that anyone could call themselves a psychologist anyway, but it appears more complicated than that.  And she does have a Masters of Psychology from way back.

But certainly, to me, "clinical psychologist" suggests experience with with face to face counselling to those in need of psychological care and aid.   And it would seem she has never done that.   Doing an interview with a convicted sex offending teacher who bragged about how good the sexual encounters were with his 15 year old student?  Yes - oh, and good call, Bettina.    

You see, until reading another NewMatilda article from 2007, I had forgotten how long she has been someone who really is best ignored, with her repeated opinion pieces from that period arguing that some sex offenders are not doing as much harm that people think they are.   Most fondled girls or boys will be fine, she argues (with no actual clinical psychology experience, mind you.)   Rape as a social problem is being exaggerated is a long standing theme - although we still have a society in which I have to fret about my teenage daughter not walking too far at night, even in my relatively safe, middle class suburb.

Bettina hates people embracing victim-hood too strongly - and to be honest, there are cases where that's a reasonable response.   (That discrimination case against QUT students brought by the aboriginal staffer, for example.)

But in the matter of sexual offending against children - the Royal Commission into it gave some stark evidence of the commonly occurring, dire long term effects of it.   It's really a topic on which her past assertions have been made to look like a really inappropriate call.  

The puzzling thing about Arndt is that her media work in the 1970's on promoting an open attitude towards sex and sex education made her seem a Left wing, pro-feminist, character, as supporters of sexual revolution of the prior decade invariably were.    Yet she is now aligned with the Men's Rights movement, which is as Right wing and anti-feminist as it gets.

I see from Wikipedia that, after her years editing Forum and getting her head on TV to titillate women watching the Mike Walsh Show about how they could have better sex lives, her first husband died and she remarried to an American lawyer.  Did he turn her into a Right winger, either of conservative or libertarian persuasion*?   It would hardly be surprising if his family was very  conservative, as her NYT wedding notice read:

The bridegroom is the son of Lieut. Gen. Willard W. Scott Jr, Superintendent of the United States Military Academy, and Mrs. Scott of West Point, N.Y. The Rev. Edmund Campion, a Roman Catholic priest, performed the ceremony at the Australian Naval Memorial Chapel in Watson's Bay, Sydney.

So did she even become an obnoxious Right wing Catholic, of the kind that blights Catallaxy?   Perhaps.  It would help explain the later path of her career.

In one other article, I see that one of her other jobs was this:

Next Bettina spent five years working as an online dating coach, giving advice to men and women on online dating, helping with writing their profiles and increasing their chances of meeting the right match. See more about her coaching experiences here.

Gee.  She also has been very interested in the topic of erectile dysfunction (my bold):

The diarists recorded the interaction between the couples when men use the new drugs such as Viagra, Cialis, Levitra and Caverject. These can be miraculous treatments yet there’s a mystery – almost a half of all men who start taking these drugs give up on them.How much of the problem is women’s indifference to the rejuvenated penis? Bettina’s earlier research showed many men flying high on their new lease of sexual life are brought swiftly to earth by sexually disinterested partners.  There are many women who are delighted that their men are being forced to hang up their spurs – women who are not at all happy about this miraculous rejuvenated penis.  Bettina’s book, What Men Want, includes five chapters on erectile dysfunction.

No wonder the male dominated, somewhat ageing, members (ha!, a pun) of the Coalition government gave her a gong.

But it seems clear that Bettina has become increasingly annoyed at women not playing the role she thinks women should.   She's now aged 70, I see.   Surely has made enough money, can't she just retire?

 

*  Are we sure she has never been a member of the libertarian friendly IPA?  She appears on the podcasts, I see.  She certainly has had a touch of nutty ageing Robert Heinlein about her - wanting women to be strong, but not like feminist strong; knowing-when-they-need-to-service-their-men type strong.