Paul Sheehan’s bodice ripper

Paul Sheehan’s piece in the Sydney Morning Herald – The ABC of seduction: how Mr Darcy depends on damsels – made me feel dirty. And not in the good way. He compares the “seduction of Annabel Crabb” to a Jane Austen heroine, as though she was defenceless against Mark Scott’s advances, and makes her move from Fairfax to the ABC rather tawdry, as though maybe they were even shagging and it’s his baby she’s about to have:

At first Crabb ignored the advances of this would-be tempter, this modern Mr Darcy. She was non-responsive to offers of greater wealth. She pointed out she was pregnant, and that she loved to write for a living. None of this dissuaded Mr Darcy, who offered still greater blandishments. The pressure began to build.

I’ve never been a fan of Paul Sheehan’s opinion pieces. He has a way of writing about women that he thinks will put us in our place without us even noticing. That’s how smart he thinks he is.

One can only imagine the amount of profligate and shocking sitting down together by Ms Crabb and Mr Darcy. So the slow and expensive seduction took place, leaving Mr Darcy, also known as Mark Scott, managing director of the ABC, to rejoice in extracting Crabb from her Fairfax family. Victory came at a price: about $250,000 a year, all underwritten by the Australian taxpayer.

Sounds like Sheehan is just pissed off that he wasn’t wooed by the ABC. And how’s this for offensive:

Now we know why he wanted her so badly. He needed her to opine, report, interview, quip, tweet, blog and otherwise flog the new 24-hour ABC news channel he announced last week. He already had an appealing woman of consequence to help launch this new network, Leigh Sales, but he knew that two cerebral bombshells is so much more than one.

He then goes on to get an erection over Fox News in the US, sticks the boot into all left-wing media, and says the ABC will become a ratings failure. Or something.

Annabel vs Miranda

Annabel Crabb in the Sydney Morning Herald writes: “Why would a group of blokes come together, as if drawn by some invisible gravitation force, and gather in a room to masturbate with each other? What do we ordinarily call that behaviour? Let’s say it out loud: it’s the gayest thing ever”. You should check out the whole piece, it’s great.

Compare that to Miranda Devine’s opinion piece – and I so dearly want to stay I don’t take the bait, but sometimes you just have to. Miranda, dear Miranda, thinks the issue is about group sex – which clearly offends her. Apparently, anyone who gets up to anything other than missionary with the lights out must be damaged in some way. But this is the really disgusting bit: “Young women are told they can act and dress any way they please, and it is men, alone, with their supposedly filthy, uncontrollable sexual desires, who must restrain themselves.”

Yawn. One more time for the slow kids up the back. Rape – and I’m not saying the Matthew Johns group sex consent scandal is about rape – but rape happens when a man decides to rape a woman. It doesn’t matter what that woman is wearing. Burka-clad women in Afghanistan get raped, so it’s got nothing to do with mini skirts. She then says modern society is like the Twilight series for teen girls, in which women have “natural modesty and intense romantic longings” and men are tortured by their superhuman restraint in not raping everything with a heartbeat.