What the cat dragged in

Helen Haines, two-bit Jeffrey Epsteins, and “good men”

Rarely in life does one read an OpEd piece in which the author – a person you don’t know, but of a sort you wouldn’t expect to have any major quarrel with – reveals just how much they hate you – or your sort, at least – and in a lefty forum where you wouldn’t remotely expect such, anti-you hatred to be expressed.  But such was my gobsmacked reaction to reading Julianne Schultz in today’s Guardian.

Firstly, for the record, I deplore the recent violent attack on Helen Haines.  I have never met her (or Brendan Nugent), and wish Haines well in her long road to recovery.   And more surprisingly, perhaps, to state for the record that Julianne Schultz and I share at least one – and I suspect many more – major enemies:  US President Donald Trump.  Re the probable plethora of others, while Schultz doesn’t directly allude to sovereign citizens (possibly because they come in all genders, and her piece is centred on threats to women), in my view they are (also) a serious threat to humanity, as well as a personal, deeply-felt bug-bear.  So mask-wearing and vaccination mandates were the two worst things that happened to them, by government edict, in 2020-22?  Well, they obviously didn’t experience anything like my own level of Covid lockdown trauma – so get the f*** out of the metaphorical emergency ward, you whining princesses (of all genders) with your hurty-wurty paper-cuts – meaning please just go away and STFU.

Anyhoo, back to Julianne Schultz’s own personal bug-bear, and its antidote:

“it is demonstrable that angry, unstable men particularly hate capable, intelligent and gracious women. By contrast, good men adore them.”

Wow.  I say this as a self-identifying “angry, unstable man” (in case the above sentence ending “STFU” hadn’t already given that away), but even more vehemently, I am someone who asserts – proudly so – to not be one of Schultz’s “good men”.  

Here, I certainly don’t claim to hate Schultz personally, nor the particular type of women – obviously including Helen Haines, and probably also herself – that she lauds, nor women generally.   But from my reading of the media coverage around the likely motivations behind Brendan Nugent’s alleged attack on Helen Haines, Schultz is plainly barking up the wrong tree if she thinks that this was just another man-hates-woman, gendered (alleged) attack.  Worse, her “good men” antidote reveals abysmal ignorance about the realities of child sexual abuse and of holding high political office, particularly as an independent in regional Australia.

To start with the latter, to get elected as an independent federal MP, Helen Haines has had to what anyone else who wins the same prize would have to have done – schmooze widely, especially among the local movers and shakers.  Which necessarily means, whether she likes – or indeed knows – it or not, dealing with the local two-bit Jeffrey Epsteins.  Here, I’m using the notorious Jeffrey Epstein as specific sort of shorthand – many towns and cities in Australia, including in  Helen Haines’ seat of Indi, would have (or have had, in recent decades) a (usually very) scaled-down version of “Epstein Island”, meaning a place where middle-class and above paedophile men can do their thing; but not necessarily that thing nor an actual physical place:  remaining an unprosecuted paedophile (or in Epstein’s case, an abuser of young adults, for the most part) logically requires sustaining a network of capable (and probably also intelligent, and possibly even gracious) men – and sometimes also women.  To Julianne Schultz, I’m sorry to have to be the one to break this news to you, but the adoring “good men” in your life statistically almost certainly include unprosecuted paedophiles.  But more importantly for the purposes of my argument, ditto for the “good men” in Helen Haines’ social and professional networks.  As something of an aside here, I note that the Australian newspaper seems to labour under the curious twin beliefs that child sexual abuse mainly, if not only, happens in remote Indigenous Australia, and conversely that slum-living conditions per se are only of high newsworthiness when covering precariously-housed middle-aged white males: (i) living in north-eastern Victoria, and (ii) accused of serious crimes.  Lucky that we don’t have to worry about child-rapists living among us when we’re worried sick about the unsightly mess next door – and vice versa!

Being a male survivor of child sexual abuse – as I infer, from media reports, that Brendan Nugent was (with the likely perpetrator also being painfully apparent) – surely results in an invidious, binary choice during the first decades of adulthood:  to become a perpetrator oneself – but with the important, apparently to Julianne Schultz anyway, redeeming benefit of being a “good man” in others’ eyes – or to take the opposite (and decent, I would have thought) road and hence presumptively be shunned and shunted aside *, as angry and unstable.  Until today, I was genuinely unaware that this – to me, insidious and rancorous – othering was apparently a widespread and socially acceptable thing; so I’ll finish by saying thank-you, Ms Schultz, for having, on this occasion, said the quiet bit out loud.    

 * Schultz makes no mention of mental health programs, etc – OTOH (as she is quite possibly aware), these are almost non-existent for middle-aged men living in regional Australia, at least.