Men behaving badly

Men behaving badly has to be the correct label for the past week in Australian politics, where you had a lot of eye-rollingly-bad conduct by quite a few blokes starting with Jamie Briggs. The Liberal MP apparently conducted himself poorly with respect to a young female staffer employed by DFAT during a business trip in Hong Kong. When this blew up, and the media started to cover the events in detail, along comes Liberal front bencher Peter Dutton mistakenly sending a text message to a female journalist he was talking about, he thought to a friend, calling her a "mad fucking witch".

Samantha Maiden - the journalist in question - generously appeared on TV the next day to say she forgave all of Dutton's sins but there seems to be a pattern emerging of men just being complete idiots in public when it comes to the ladies. To top it all off you get a West Indian cricketer, Chris Gayle, boorishly propositioning a female journalist on-camera, in the process deeply humiliating her.

It just doesn't pay to be a professional woman in Australia. All those years of fighting for better conditions, equal pay, and more opportunities to play in the big leagues, and you get cack-handed fools like Briggs, Dutton and Gayle coming in and soiling the furniture. It's sort of the public analogue of a pack of wet and muddy dogs rolling around on the just-vacuumed couch. Yuck! Outside, all of you!