It deserves to be read carefully rather than with the applause/anger that is evident in social media today.
Gleeson comments
This article analyses the nature and effect of the campaign against the Family Court led by social commentator Bettina Arndt from 1995 to 2006, in the context of the men's rights agenda and the politics of anti-feminist backlash. It documents the changes to Australian family law and the workings of the Family Court under the Howard government, as a result of this campaign, in order to understand the politics of backlash in the context of Wendy Brown's States of Injury theory of 1995. In this analysis, the conservative men's rights agenda is understood as a reaction to structural and economic adjustments associated with neoliberal reforms, especially labour market regulation. But this context, of structural adjustment, is distorted in the rhetoric and focus of campaigns characterised by anti-feminist backlash, such as that directed at the Family Court in Australia. The example of Arndt and her championing of men's rights in this arena is presented as a means by which to compare the different experiences and traditions of feminism in Australia and America, and the associated politics of backlash in each nation, all of which have had a profound influence on Arndt's outlook and work.
Bettina Arndt is a remarkably understudied figure in Australian law and politics. Capitalising on her prolific media career over three decades including editing the 1970s sex advice magazine Forum, Arndt was brought into the fold of the conservative Howard government as an advisor on issues such as assisted reproduction, education and child support. Her persistent criticism of matters of family law proved most influential, and saw Arndt serve on the 2001 Family Law Pathways Advisory Group, which was instrumental in redrafting family law in 2006. Nonetheless, Arndt has received scant academic attention, albeit with acknowledgements made of her status as a leading advocate of the Australian men's rights movement (e.g., see Flood 2004; Kaye and Tolmi 1998). Arndt once described herself as a feminist inspired by Germaine Greer, and feminism as ‘the most significant social movement of the second half of the 20th century’, but still she blames the women's movement for naively expecting men to change in line with a revolution in personal relationships ‘sought by women and imposed on men’ (Arndt 1995a, 2). Arndt advocates a men's movement, unrelated to feminism, through which ‘men are changing in response to their own needs rather than simply acquiescing to remove obstacles to women's progress’ (Arndt 1995a, 7). It is men in marriages with whom she is most concerned. On the appointment of Australia's first female Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Arndt criticised Gillard for setting a negative example by living in a de facto relationship, or ‘marriage lite’ as she described it (Arndt 2010b, 11).
In the past, the occasional question was raised about Arndt's relationship to feminism, along the lines of ‘Bettina Arndt: Friend or Foe?’ (Young 1994). But it has been a long time now since Arndt was considered a possible friend to feminism. Since the mid-1990s, the answer has been a resounding ‘foe!’, much to Arndt's apparent satisfaction. Arndt's extolling of men's rights, as well as her critique of feminist analyses of domestic violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment and sex within marriage, has provoked feminist ire in the press (e.g., see Bastow 2012), leading her to write of a ‘Bettina Arndt hate campaign’ staged by women (www.bettinaarndt.com.au). A typical appraisal of Arndt has her reading early the winds of change following the libertarian moment of the 1970s to presciently embody the New Right conservatism of Thatcherism and Reaganism, in time for their Australian counterpart brought to bear under Howard from 1996. Some commentators, including Arndt's ‘friends’, suggest there is a ‘good chance’ Arndt made the calculated choice to champion men's rights ‘because no-one else was’ (Pascoe, quoted in Cadzow 2010). At the same time, Arndt has been described as part of an effective male ‘backlash’ against feminism (Young 1994, 10), a phrase that should prompt consideration of Susan Faludi's 1991 treatise Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. Curiously though, at the time of Faludi's book there was significant doubt about its relevance to Australia, when femocrats still reigned federally, feminist rape law and other reforms were implemented and women's departments flourished within state governments and academia. Indeed, Arndt's concerted reinvention of herself as a men's rights champion in Australia from 1991 benefited significantly from her time spent living in New York in the late 1980s, and mostly pre-empted the Australian experience of feminist backlash both within the movement (such the 1995 First Stone controversy) and outside it, such as the ‘revenge of the mainstream’ performed by Howard on feminist bureaucracies and women's services and programmes from 1996 (Johnson 2000).
In this article, I am interested in examining the nature and effects of Arndt's ideas and campaigns in the area of family law to document their effect, and as a way of exploring the differences between Australian and American feminist traditions and the related politics of ‘backlash’ in each nation. Although she has been a prolific commentator on many aspects of interpersonal relationships, especially in the Murdoch press, from 1995 to 2006 Arndt was preoccupied with family law. While a minority of conservatives, such as current Prime Minister Tony Abbott, argue for the reintroduction of fault-based divorce, or ‘covenant marriages’ (Abbott 2009), most controversy surrounding the Family Court (hereafter ‘the Court’) concerns not conditions for divorce, but arrangements for children after divorce. While most couples establish their children's living arrangements at the time they separate without recourse to law, for those who cannot come to agreement the Court will mandate living and contact arrangements. It has been observed for some time that as no-fault divorce came to be generally accepted in Australia, a gendered ‘war’ over parenting emerged, coinciding with the displacement of marriage as the ‘pivotal regulatory concept’ in family law and the development of a ‘research-informed’ approach to deciding disputes about children's living arrangements (Rhoades 2010, 164). With the demise of divorce as a source of contest between spouses, and between progressive and conservative ideologies, battles over children grew in prominence (Rhoades 2010, 164), with men's rights lobbies increasingly arguing for a form of what they call ‘joint custody’ to be mandated by the Court. The question of domestic violence has been central to this contest. For some men aggrieved by Court decisions and the related issue of child support payments, the entire family law system has acted as a lightning rod for greater feelings of displacement in a post-feminist world. This is a position Arndt has been keen to champion. In particular, during a period coinciding mostly with the Howard years (1996–2007), a populist discourse of men being systematically disadvantaged by the Court came to prevail, while the Court's function and budget were transformed and undermined. Former Chief Justice of the Family Court, Alastair Nicholson, described this as a time when, fuelled by Arndt's commentary, many politicians and members of the public came to believe that ‘fathers [were] in fact victimised by the system’ (2004). This discourse culminated in family law reforms of 2006, which diluted feminist understandings of the role and nature of domestic violence in family breakdowns and enshrined the new legal paradigm of the ‘rebuttable presumption of shared parental responsibility’ of children in Court ordered decisions. Undeniably, the men's rights campaign has been effective.
To expand the backlash thesis of Faludi and others, the work of Wendy Brown on States of Injury (1995) is useful, and I suggest it may help explain the peculiar nature of Arndt's outlook, which is informed by a persistent Australian libertarian streak nourished in her time with Forum, as well as the perceived ‘injuries’ of American men suffering from economic and cultural displacement under neoliberalism, especially Reaganomics. Brown uses Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment — the moralising revenge of the powerless, the ‘triumph of the weak as weak’ (Brown 1995, 67) — to represent the psychological state experienced by groups and individuals who, on finding their expression of the good life frustrated and marginalised in liberal democratic political regimes, seek solace in politicised identities. This is particularly the case for women who, in order to participate in patriarchal public life, must embody identities of ‘embittered but consuming ressentiment over their exclusion’ (Brown, quoted in Genovese 2007, 186). Ann Genovese has shown the limitations of understanding men's experiences of ressentiment in response to feminist orthodoxy in politics and policy, because despite the rise of feminism men still remain ‘the normative subject’ (2007, 187). Nonetheless, Margaret Thornton notes that when the political and cultural ‘pendulum swings to the Left’ conservative men (and women) do tend to assume an identity of having been ‘injured’ (Thornton 2006, 154).
The focus and rage of men directed at the Court, as enunciated by Arndt, represents a none-too-subtle rage at feminism, an easy target for men seeking a qualitative social change to identify as implicated in their fate of displacement. But this discourse promoted by Arndt of conservative/progressive culture wars and associated psychic injuries serves to mask the material conditions that contribute to men's lived experiences and identities of powerlessness, even those who constitute the normative subject. Contemporary identity politics emerged in response to the neoliberal transformation of society and economy, ‘rooted in disciplinary productions but oriented by liberal discourse towards protest against exclusion from a discursive formation of universal justice’ (Brown 1995, 58). In Brown's analysis, the identity of injury is heightened by the individualising conditions of modern society that have seen traditional forms of association disintegrate alongside an unprecedented expansion of domination by ‘capital and bureaucratic state and social networks’, leaving the citizen to feel an ‘unparalleled individual powerlessness over the fate and direction of one's own life’ (1995, 68). But still feminism remains a primary target for ‘angry white men’ (Sawer 1999, 1). Identities of a ‘state of injury’ continue to inform contemporary conservative agendas in today's atomised society, manifesting frequently as ‘the politics of reproach, rancour, moralism and guilt’ (Brown 1995, 68) directed at feminism.
Hence, while mostly overlooking the changing economic and structural positions of men, Bettina Arndt links men's alienation and feelings of powerlessness in regard to their families almost exclusively to a feminist success, whereby traditional fatherhood and other masculine roles have been devalued in a feminist-affected society in which ‘men are losing’ (ABC TV 2007). Angela McRobbie (2010) notes that one of the central truisms of post-feminism is that of a feminist success in politics, culture and society that has ‘gone too far’. The Australian experience of state feminism and the work of femocrats make this country's feminism especially vulnerable to these claims. In particular, Arndt depicts the Court as having been captured by feminism to the detriment of men, providing an arena in which: vile accusations are made against men with impunity, where perjury has no consequences. A court where men have to pay and pay to try to persuade the Court to enforce its own orders. A court which even allows a woman to rename her child if it suits her. (2005, 92)
In contrast, Genovese writes that the idea of a feminist success in the Court is ‘simply not empirically or legally correct’ (2007, 179).
Understanding Arndt and the Australian men's rights campaign against the Court in terms of a ‘state of injury’ helps expose the strategic use and effect of the grievances of those men who despite their ‘normative subject’ position identify as injured, particularly and paradoxically at times of conservative rule, when their claims have the greatest capacity for influence. In the first half of this article, I introduce Arndt and the cultural and political traditions in which she resided before the time of the Howard government to emphasise the national idiosyncrasies of American and Australian feminism. In the second half, I provide a detailed exposition of the effects of the men's rights agenda on family law under Howard to illustrate the paradoxical power and success of a conservative agenda that perpetuates an identity of powerlessness and ‘injury’ as a crucial element of its campaign, which is encouraged by ‘sympathetic’ regimes such as the Howard government. Each focus deserves detailed attention. Despite her one-eyed view of family law, Arndt provides a more complex example than a caricature of conservative backlash, or a simple disagreement over who benefits from the workings of the Court. For, although she has proved a phenomenal ally and champion of aggrieved conservative men, Arndt's Australian libertarianism has left her out in the cold with many conservatives in power, including, ultimately, the Howard government. But this characteristic outlook of Arndt's has forged no relationships with Australian feminists either, who have long since moved on from their libertarian heritage. Arndt may well be one of a kind.
