Q&A Is Way Better Without Politicians: The Ten Best Bits Of Last Night’s Show
Simulcast live from the Festival Of Dangerous Ideas, featuring Germaine Greer, Dan Savage, Peter Hitchens and Hanna Rosin.
It was the perfect recipe for a winning Q&A. A gay rights activist, sex columnist, and advocate of polygamy. A pioneering voice in second-wave feminism, struggling to hold onto her relevancy. A political commentator and gender theorist, who believes women are taking over. A humorless and hyper-conservative troll, who used to be a socialist and appears to be insane.
All of them are opinionated. All of them articulate. And the best bit? None of them were politicians.
The conversation of last night’s program — simulcast from the Festival of Dangerous Ideas — leapt from gay rights through hook-up culture through gender inequality, to one of the most sense-making discussions on the so-called sanctity of marriage that we’ve been treated to in a while.
Watch the full episode below, or skip past it for the highlights.
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The Ten Best Bits
07:06 — The Part About Peter Hitchens’ ‘Collapse Of Western Civilisation’
Dan Savage: Could I characterise the system you are trying to defend? It is the conservatism of, “Ick, I don’t like that, therefore you should not be allowed to do it. I don’t approve of drinking, I don’t use drugs myself, I don’t suck dick myself, therefore you should be legally prevented from doing those things”? That’s radical, that is not conservative.
Peter Hitchens: And what’s so brilliant about that?
Dan Savage: I give a wicked blowjob. Pretty brilliant.
Peter Hitchens: — Because there are things I think that we see around us that we do not like, and if we don’t act to stop them then we’re guilty of allowing them to take place.
Dan Savage: But ‘I don’t like it’ isn’t a good enough reason to use the force of the state to stop it. I don’t like cunnilingus, but I’m not going to use the force of the state to prevent that from happening.
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07:50 — The Part Where Peter Hitchens Is A Cranky Old Man
Peter Hitchens: It’s fantastic, the ease with which someone can fill a room with laughter by just being rude and unpleasant.
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16:55 — The Part Where Dan Savage NOPE’d Peter Hitchens
Tony Jones: I’m going to throw to Dan Savage, because I think you did want to respond to what Peter Hitchens said earlier.
Dan Savage: I don’t remember what he said at this point. But I disagree with it, whatever it was.
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17:13 — The Part Where Germaine Greer Sounded Depressingly Outdated
Germaine Greer: Speaking as someone who teaches young women, I find that one of the greatest problems we have is that young women enter into relationships at university that are friendly, they’re intimate, they’re fun, but they’re not a binding arrangement, it’s not a prelude to a marriage. And generally when exam time comes around, the guys get a bit serious and it all stops. And my young women fall to pieces, because they really believed that this was it. And I want to say to them, ‘He’s a boy, he wants sex, he wants friendship, he wants fun. He’s not ready to commit himself, why did you go more than halfway? Why did you believe this was the one, when it’s actually now completely destroying you?’
Dan Savage: … You don’t seriously believe that there aren’t young women out there who want fun, who want sex, who want companionship —
Hanna Rosin: –– and who are not destroyed at the end of a relationship?
Dan Savage: It’s not like all women are trading sex for male attention. There are women out there who want sex.
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22:02 — The Part Where Hanna Rosin Treated Us Like The Backward Country We [Cringe] Kind Of Are
Tony Jones: Your book looks mostly at post-GFC recession in America, and the shift that’s going on where we’ve actually seen women become the largest group in the workforce. Is it just an American phenomenon that you’re talking about?
Hanna Rosin: No, it’s not just an American phenomenon. It looks different in different countries. For example, the words “deliberately barren” I don’t think would be spoken in America the way they are part of your political culture, apparently… In our country, that’s reserved for the bible, the words “deliberately barren”. So you know, different countries have different —
Tony Jones: It’s not commonly used, that phrase; it was used once.
Hanna Rosin: [Laughs] Okay, I won’t pin it on the whole of the country, I got you, I got you, yes. Except that your current Prime Minister also said that women were physiologically not suited for leadership.
[At 37.56] What’s been fascinating to me, to watch the Gillard/Abbott switch-over, is that in our country we do all our racism and sexism in code, and here you do it overtly. So you know, she gets to call him a “prime misogynist”, which are words that Hillary Clinton would never use, and then he gets to say to her — what was the other fantastic thing he said? — oh, that she needed to make an “honest woman” of herself.
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26:43 — The Part Where It Was Just A Horrible Question
Audience Question From Kimberley Adler: Do you think it’s possible that the Women’s Liberation movement has gone too far away from the primary role of women, to nurture and raise their children?
The current role of mothering is being performed by paid care givers. My observations are showing me that there is a direct correlation between narcissism rising in the population and the early separation of mother and child. The woman who “can do it all” tend to have children with narcissistic traits.
We ship our kids off to strangers to raise them and wonder why everyone is tired and depressed. Why are we allowing the narcissists who currently rule our world to tell us how to raise our children?
Dan Savage: Well clearly we need to re-enslave women. That’s the solution.
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27:45 — The Part Where It Was Just A Horrible Answer
Peter Hitchens: There’s extraordinary pressure to hand over children to paid strangers while their actual mothers are tripped off to work.
Hanna Rosin: Wait, why do the women have to do it if it’s such an important job? Dan [Savage] has done a fine job raising his child.
Peter Hitchens: Should I tell you a very simple reason why? It may not apply to you, but in a lot of cases: they’re better at it … Anybody who’s been involved in raising children knows that women are better at it.
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36:20 — The Part Where Germaine Greer Zing’d Tony Abbott
Germaine Greer: For me, the greatest mystery is that Tony Abbott is a Rhodes scholar. He is a product of one of our finest British universities.
Peter Hitchens: Well so is Bill Clinton. So what?
Germaine Greer: Well the interesting thing is it looks like a populist right wing government has to pretend to be extremely stupid. And Tony Abbott is very good at that.
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37:36 — The Part Where Dan Savage Gave Us Hope
Tony Jones: Dan, how does this look, from your perspective in the United States? You’ve seen our change of government here…
Dan Savage: I just think that you’re having your George W. Bush moment, and hopefully in a few years you’ll have your Barack Obama moment.
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55:15 — The Part Where Dan Savage Zing’d Peter Hitchens
Dan Savage: You are absolutely entitled to hold your opinions, but you sit there pathologising other people’s choices; you sit there saying that other people being free to live their lives by their own light in some way opresses you, when it oppresses you in no way whatsoever.
You are free not to get gay married; you are free not to use drugs; you are free not to drink; you are free to stay married to one person for the rest of your life; you are free to stay home and raise your wife’s children so they always have a parent by their side.
You are not free to sit there and say that other people being just as free as you are to live their own lives and make their own choices is in some way damaging you personally, is in some way destroying society.
People are freer now, and happier now. It’s a less intolerant world than it used to be, because people like me are now empowered to look at people like you and say you are full of shit.