Our Dispatch today was first published on 22 April 2011.  The racist Intervention continues with white Australia’s complicity, the deliberate destruction of language is ongoing.

Estimados amigos,

Back from a Magical Mystery Tour
http://youtu.be/Hnrsqf33MXA

As we sat in a restaurant in Palomar, my childhood friend, Robi, (that I hadn’t seen in 55 years, and “found” on Facebook some time ago) pointed across to a building “esa es la escuela numero 51” (“that is state school no.51”). You know what? That is the first school I ever went to in 1949! In amongst my parents’ photograph collection there are me and my brother Ted wearing bright white starched “dustcoat” school uniforms. We looked like a swarm of butterflies as we took our first steps on the road to literacy and numeracy, multilingualism and adulthood.

The palm tree in the park that my brother set on fire (leaving a tall black stump that later magically sprouted new green fronds) is no longer there, neither is the magnolia tree. Robi’s older brother and I had tried to make magnolia perfume, a miserable failure. We lived in la Avenida Colegio Militar it’s since been renamed la Avenida de los Geranios. It was in front of Robi’s house that Ted and Robi had strung a rope across the Avenida Colegio Militar and made Herr Fischbach fall off his bycicle. Robi now tells me he copped a hiding from his father for that.

There is a Spanish word añoranzas which describes a feeling of yearning for a past that no longer exists.

Añoranzas has no exact equivalent in the English language.

It is a feeling I occasionally get for my childhood in Argentina.

…despreciaron la chacarera por otra danza importada….
http://youtu.be/cYei_BKOOGE

El bien perdido (“the good lost”- yet another inadequate translation)
http://youtu.be/Agu63R4C2CM

The two most important words in Portuguese are obrigado (thank you) and saudades.

Wikipedia: Saudade (singular) or saudades (plural) is a Portuguese language word difficult to translate adequately, which describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic longing for something or someone that one was fond of and which is lost.
http://youtu.be/9kkiGJOJaUs
http://youtu.be/E_7BV-IuyKI

“Above all, let us permit native children to keep their own languages, – those beautiful and expressive tongues, rich in true Australian imagery, charged with poetry and with love for all that is great, ancient and eternal in the continent. There is no need to fear that their own languages will interfere with the learning of English as the common medium of expression for all Australians. In most areas of Australia the natives have been bilingual, probably from time immemorial. Today white Australians are among the few remaining civilized people who still think that knowledge of one language is the normal limit of linguistic achievement.” – T.G.H Strelow,1958.

Every language is precious. I’ve said it before: to deny children the opportunity to grow up multilingual and multi-literate when the circumstances exist to make this possible, is nothing less than a crime.
http://youtu.be/EHtZJC_4YmE

In case you didn’t know, the Warlpiri language has an almost exact equivalent of saudade, it is yirraru.

Ngula juku
Jungarrayi

A yes vote in Scotland would unleash the most dangerous thing of all – hope Independence would carry the potential to galvanise progressive movements across the rest of the UK

George Monbiot,  Tuesday 9 September 2014, The Guardian

Of all the bad arguments urging the Scots to vote no – and there are plenty – perhaps the worst is the demand that Scotland should remain in the union to save England from itself. Responses to my column last week suggest this wretched apron-strings argument has some traction among people who claim to belong to the left.

Consider what it entails: it asks a nation of 5.3 million to forgo independence to exempt a nation of 54 million from having to fight its own battles. In return for this self-denial, the five million must remain yoked to the dismal politics of cowardice and triangulation that cause the problems from which we ask them to save us.

“A UK without Scotland would be much less likely to elect any government of a progressive hue,” former Labour minister Brian Wilson claimed in the Guardian last week. We must combine against the “forces of privilege and reaction” (as he lines up with the Conservatives, Ukip, the Lib Dems, the banks, the corporations, almost all the rightwing columnists in Britain, and every UK newspaper except the Sunday Herald) – in the cause of “solidarity”.

There’s another New Labour weasel word to add to its lexicon (other examples include reform, which now means privatisation; and partnership, which means selling out to big business). Once solidarity meant making common cause with the exploited, the underpaid, the excluded. Now, to these cyborgs in suits, it means keeping faith with the banks, the corporate press, cuts, a tollbooth economy and market fundamentalism.

Here, to Wilson and his fellow flinchers, is what solidarity meant while they were in office. It meant voting for the Iraq war, for Trident, for identity cards, for 3,500 new criminal offences, including the criminalisation of most forms of peaceful protest. It meant being drafted in as political mercenaries to impose on the English policies to which the Scots were not subject, such as university top-up fees and foundation hospitals. It meant supporting every destructive and unjust proposition advanced by their leaders: the brood parasites who hatched in the Labour nest then flicked its dearest principles over the edge. It’s no surprise that the more the Scots see of their former Labour ministers, the more inclined they are to vote for independence.

So now Better Together has brought in Gordon Brown, scattering bribes in a desperate, last-ditch effort at containment. They must hope the Scots have forgotten that he boasted of setting “the lowest rate in the history of British corporation tax, the lowest rate of any major country in Europe and the lowest rate of any major industrialised country anywhere”. That he pledged to the City of London “in budget after budget, I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers”. That, after 13 years of Labour government, the UK had higher levels of inequality than after 18 years of Tory government. That his government colluded in kidnapping and torture. That he helped cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands through his support for the illegal war on Iraq.

He roams through Scotland, still badged with blood, promising what he never delivered when he had the chance, this man who helped unravel the social safety net his predecessors wove; who marketised and dismembered public services; who enriched the wealthy and shafted the poor; who pledged money for Trident but failed to reverse the loss of social housing; whose private finance initiative planted a series of timebombs now exploding throughout the NHS and other public services; who greased and wheedled and slavered his way into the company of bankers and oligarchs while trampling over the working people he was elected to represent. This is the progressive Prester John who will ride to the rescue of the no campaign?

Where, in Scotland’s Labour party, are the Keir Hardies and Jimmy Reids of our time? Where is the vision, the inspiration, the hope? The shuffling, spineless little men who replaced these titans offer nothing but fear. Through fear, they seek to shove Scotland back into its box, as its people rebel against the dreary, closed future mapped out for them – and the rest of us – by the three main Westminster parties.

Sure, if Scotland becomes independent, all else being equal, Labour would lose 41 seats at Westminster and Tory majorities would become more likely. But all else need not be equal. Scottish independence can galvanise progressive movements across the rest of the UK. We’ll watch as the Scots engage in the transformative process of writing a constitution. We’ll see that a nation of these islands can live and – I hope – flourish with a fully elected legislature (no House of Lords), with a fair electoral system (proportional representation), and with a parliament in which only representatives of that nation can vote (no cross-border mercenaries).

Already, the myth of political apathy has been scotched by the tumultuous movement north of the border. As soon as something is worth voting for, people will queue into the night to add their names to the register. The low voter turnouts in Westminster elections reflect not an absence of interest but an absence of hope.

If Scotland becomes independent, it will be despite the efforts of almost the entire UK establishment. It will be because social media has defeated the corporate media. It will be a victory for citizens over the Westminster machine, for shoes over helicopters. It will show that a sufficiently inspiring idea can cut through bribes and blackmail, through threats and fear-mongering. That hope, marginalised at first, can spread across a nation, defying all attempts to suppress it. That you can be hated by the Daily Mail and still have a chance of winning.

If Labour has any political nous, any remaining flicker of courage, it will understand what this moment means. Instead of suppressing the forces of hope and inspiration, it would mobilise them. It would, for instance, pledge, in its manifesto, a referendum on drafting a written constitution for the rest of the UK.

It would understand that hope is the most dangerous of all political reagents. It can transform what appears to be a fixed polity, a fixed outcome, into something entirely different. It can summon up passion and purpose we never knew we possessed. If Scotland becomes independent, England – if only the potential were recognised – could also be transformed.

Twitter: @georgemonbiot. A fully referenced version of this article can be found at monbiot.com

Anthony Eames writes: With the Scottish referendum looming, a vote for independence is now becoming a real possibility.  Indeed, this timely article from the New Scientist suggests that the days of the large, unitary nation-state could be over, giving way to smaller regional entities, such as Catalonia, Padonia, Free Tyrol, the Basque nation, Hutt River Province, etc.

This process could lead to the British Isles eventually accomodating the Irish Republic, The Welsh Free State, the Manx People’s Republic, the Autonomous Duchy of Cornwall and the Channel Islands Federation… oh, yes, and the Kingdom of England, too, of course!  But regardless of all this treasonous talk, count on it that the staunch Proddies of Ulster will stay loyal to the last! (No Surrender!)

Seriously, Scottish independence could raise many questions.  For example, would the current Union flag be redesigned to reflect the removal of St Andrew’s Cross  – and would that Disunion Jack be then carried over to our own Australian flag?  Would the Gaelic language enjoy the same official status in Scotland as in Ireland?  Would the Celtic nations of Ireland and Scotland form a voting bloc and trade preferences in the Eurovision Song Contest?

The answers to these and other weighty and contentious questions should be revealed very shortly…

by Alan Watterson (Letter to The Byron Shire Echo, 26 August, 2014, pp. 13-14)

I too have ‘long and first-hand memories of the Whitlam government’, Tim Harrington (Letters, August 19 – p 18)).  I remember that it funded badly needed new hospitals across Australia, introduced community health centres, support for the homeless, women’s refuges, funded the building of over 13,000 homes for low-income families, doubled support for home carers, introduced support for single mothers, increased pensions and other welfare benefits to liveable levels, and introduced universal health care (which the Fraser government, like the current one, tried to dismantle), increased funding to the neglected schools sector and abolished university fees, initiated reconciliation and self-determination for Aboriginal people, passed the Racial Discrimination Act, lowered the voting age, ended conscription, abolished capital punishment, enacted ‘one vote one value’ electoral reforms, established the Australian Legal Aid Office, introduced our own national anthem and honours system, extended the minimum adult wage to include female workers, instituted no-fault divorce and established the Family Court, cleaned up corporate behaviour with the Trade Practices Act, brought oversight to ownership with the Foreign Investment Review Committee, provided work to 32,000 otherwise unemployed Australians, enacted environmental protection legislation, protected  the Great Barrier Reef (Bjelke-Petersen wanted to drill for oil), ratified the World Heritage Convention (which later enabled the /¹⁴ protection of the Franklin River), signed up to RAMSAR, CITES AND JAMBA conventions to protect endangered species, created the Australia Council for the Arts and the Film Commission, brought sanitation to Australian cities through the National Sewage Program, and prevented the destruction of Glebe and Woolloomooloo, among other things.

All this was done while the western world was in recession due to the oil crisis, and having to fight an election every 18 months.  They may not have got everything right, but they transformed a backwater into a progressive member of the international community and laid the foundations for much of which Australia can be proud today.

Alan Watterson

Mullumbimby

In case you need to be reminded of the acronyms,

The Ramsar Convention (formally, the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, especially as Waterfowl Habitat) is an international treaty for the conservation and sustainable utilization of wetlands,^[1] recognizing the fundamental ecological functions of wetlands and their economic, cultural, scientific, and recreational value. It is named after the city of Ramsar in Iran, where the Convention was signed in 1971.

CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, also known as the Washington Convention) is a multilateral treaty to protect endangered plants and animals. It was drafted as a result of a resolution adopted in 1963 at a meeting of members of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The convention was opened for signature in 1973, and CITES entered into force on 1 July 1975. Its aim is to ensure that international trade in specimens of wild animals and plants does not threaten the survival of the species in the wild, and it accords varying degrees of protection to more than 35,000 species of animals and plants. In order to ensure that the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was not violated, the Secretariat of GATT was consulted during the drafting process.^[1]

The Japan Australia Migratory Bird Agreement (JAMBA) is a treaty between Australia and Japan to minimise harm to the major areas used by birds which migrate between the two countries. Towra Point Nature Reserve plays a role in the agreement, being an area in Australia used by migratory birds. JAMBA was first developed on February 6, 1974 and came into force on April 30, 1981.

JAMBA provides for cooperation between Japan and Australia on measures for the management and protection of migratory birds, birds in danger of extinction, and the management and protection of their environments, and requires each country to take appropriate measures to preserve and enhance the environment of birds protected under the provisions of the agreement.

by Andrew Webster  First published Fairfax, September 5, 2014

Here’s a wonderful poem by Seamus Heaney entitled  ‘Thatcher’, with comments by Ira Maine, Poetry Editor

After the Hitler war, when I was a kid in country Ireland, young local ploughmen always had an audience. One or two watchers to begin with, lifetime  habit early birds, already settling themselves on the field wall and lighting their pipes as the light came up. The horses, snuffling and eager, tramped and jingled, their breath wreathed magically around their heads. The onlookers were not there to watch a master at work. They were there to watch a learner  make a total ‘omadan’ of himself. Pronounced ‘Omma- Dawn’ it is the Gaelic word for ‘idiot.’They were there to fall about helplessly as wobbly furrows were accidentally gone over twice or trampled to hell and gone by ill-directed Irish Draught horses. They were there to see a momentary lapse in concentration fail to leave enough room to turn at the headland, or how great the hump in the middle of the field would be when the learner had finished ‘ploughing’. And they all waited, breathlessly, to see the ploughman lose his footing, stumble and fall on his arse.

Then the fun was over, the chuckling ceased and for the next two hours, the old hands would take turns to walk patiently alongside the young learner, advising, easing, quietly watching, quick to correct, murmuring encouragement, helping to instil confidence, until the boy found himself walking alone behind the horses again, the men retired to the headland once more,  watching, thoughtful and quiet.

They would be back again tomorrow, and the next day.  The boy was their apprentice now and the quality of his skills would reflect on them. They already knew, by the way he carried himself, how he accepted advice, how he responded to his animals, that he had a good head, essential to the making of a ploughman. How good would absolutely depend on them.

Bless my soul, carried away…it’s my only excuse…

Here’s a wonderful poem by Seamus Heaney entitled  ‘Thatcher’. where the already highly skilled tradesman appears suddenly one morning to perform a service that is beyond the ken, absolutely beyond the grasp of ordinary mortals. He is going to thatch a cottage. This is an absolute reversal of the ploughman story. Those who gather to watch can offer no advice but all of them have opinions. If the thatcher was to take any notice of their mutterings he might as well abandon all and take up macrame.

The second four line verse where the man seems to do very little except fiddle around with hazel and willow rods, or ‘…opened and handled sheaves of lashed wheat-straw…’

Where would you get ‘sheaves’ of wheat straw nowadays? You’d need a reaper and binder in order to get sheaves. Long lengths of  tubular wheat-straw, bound tightly together and left stacked to dry in the sun. Buy a bale of wheat-straw today and the tubular stems have been smashed, flattened and rendered useless by the baler. The tubes contain air and provide insulation within the thatch.

Down on the ground the natives are restless.

‘..it seemed he spent the morning warming up…’

You can imagine the grizzling and the grumbling, the ill-informed negative whingeing as the man goes about his professional preparation.

‘Why is he taking so long?’

‘Why doesn’t he just get on with it?’

‘What the hell’s he doing now?’

Then he is on the roof, hooping and lashing, trimming and flushing, pushing the u-shaped and sharpened hazel ‘staples’ down into the golden wheat to fix them permanently. It is a mad chaotic scene with gold bundles of wheat everywhere, and onlookers shaking their heads knowledgeably as if they knew what was wrong and knew precisely what to do to fix it. Bundles of whippy willow are hauled up amongst the rafters, adding to the  the apparent disaster. The willow is somehow sewn into place, the thatching knives alive, chopping, trimming, the whetstone singing on the blade’s edge. More and more wheat bundles are hauled aloft, some accepted, some rejected, the rejects rolling softly down the roof and catching against the half-finished thatch. Some of these tear and burst open, the contents spilling out like pin-cushions, some tumbling, to hang from the roof like golden ragged curtains..

Days go by….

What a mess! What a bloody disaster!

Quietly, one day, he raked and swept all loose and discarded material away.

Then, on another day, he ‘…stitched all together into a sloped honeycomb, a stubble patch…’

Finished, he gathered his tools, got on his bike and left.

The people who always know best,stood back confounded, slack-jawed, and gazed in disbelief at the perfectly finished, golden result.

The thatcher cycled on, leaving them ‘gaping at his Midas touch.’

A bloody great poem which provided me with excuse enough to witter on endlessly. I enjoyed every wittering syllable!

If you didn’t, well, I think you need a good slap on the leg!

Sounds like the usual suspects clutching at straws myself.

Our Dispatch today was first published on 21 April 2011.  The racist Intervention continues with white Australia’s complicity.

Buenos dias amigos,

Walking from el Jardin Japones along la Avenida del Libertador in Palermo, as I approached some large trees at the entrance to a small plaza, I felt some wet splashes, and then some more. A lady stood behind me and sang out “Señor” and pointing up at a tree “un pajaro le está cagando” (“a bird is crapping on you”), and indeed there were some vile smelling, snotty stains on my shirt and trousers. The lady started to remove the stains with a tissue, and was subsequently joined by a gentleman “no se preocupen, que lo limpio cuando llege a casa” (“don’t worry I’ll clean it when I get home”). They persevered, and I was impressed by their friendly concern. In Australia, if a kookaburra crapped on me, passers-by would only have laughed.

I then walked past the zoo and came to a chorizo stand where I ordered the Argentine equivalent of a hot dog. I took my wallet out of my trouser pocket. The driver’s licence and credit cards were there, the approx. 250 pesos were not.

I wondered if the bird had been trained to shit on people. When I got home the stain pattern on the back of my shirt clearly showed that no bird in a tree was responsible! The power of suggestion!

…I want to be free like a bird in a tree…..
http://youtu.be/0wTKo_kPlck

In hindsight the only pajarón on the scene was I!

So now, dear dispatchee (how Dickensian is that?- “dear reader”….), as is customary I’ve got you wondering: “What has all this have to do with Yuendumu?”. Well, the pickpocketting activities in Buenos Aires pale into insignificance when compared to the massive rip-off being visited upon remote Aboriginal Australia. Millions of dollars being spent on an army of bureaucrats, consultants, contractors and officials, all in the name of “Closing the Gap”. ….All in the name of Liberty…

http://youtu.be/yF7yGA-JJBw

In Argentina I got my $Aus60’s worth. I got to admire real professionals with flair doing their stuff. The same can’t be said for those that are picking the pockets of Aboriginal Australia. They don’t gracefully return the wallet with the credit cards and driver’s licence. They take those too…..es un pedazo del alma que se arranca sin piedad… (…it’s a piece of the soul, torn out without pity…)

http://youtu.be/Ja0HBp2hL-Q

…take another little piece of my heart…

http://youtu.be/-7JVxE2SYxo

Adiós

Franklin

In our previous post David Allyn identified extraordinary conservatism and little science in the medical profession’s approach to sex (such that ‘sexually assertive’ women were blamed for male impotence!).  Today we explore this theme even further, with another extract from his 2000 book Make Love not War, The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History  Little,Brown and Company, New York:

The intellectual disarray of the medical establishment regarding sex, typified by the work of George Ginsberg, paved the way for one of the most inaccurate and misleading “sex education” books of all time, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. . . But Were Afraid to Ask. It was also the hottest book of 1970 . . . .  Copies of the book were so hard to come by, one branch of the New York Public Library had a 39 person waiting list for Reuben’s book. . . . The book’s author, a New York psychiatrist, named Dr David Reuben, attained instant celebrity status.  . .  With his nerdy glasses and sheepish can-you-believe-I’m-telling-you-this smile. . . . He was the self-styled Robespierre of the sexual revolution, supposedly charging forward with brutal honesty where others feared to tread.

But Reuben’s collection of unscientific claims and recycled myths was like Robespierre’s guillotine, far more dangerous than anyone at first imagined.  It was replete with the very sort of misinformation Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson had worked hard to discredit.  “It won’t be long,” Reuben pronounced without citing any supporting evidence, “before almost everyone in the United States has venereal disease.”  Manufacturing statistics out of whole cloth, Reuben claimed that 80 percent of Americans engaged in oral sex.  In a section on birth control, he recommended douching with Coca Cola:

Long a favourite soft drink, it is, coincidentally, the best douche available.  A coke contains carbonic acid which kills the sperem and sugar which explodes the sperm cells.  The carbonation force it into the vagina under pressure and helps penetrate every tiny crevice of vaginal lining.  It is inexpensive (ten cents per application), universally available, and comes in a dispensable applicator.

Reuben failed to mention that such a procedure could cause salpingitis, peritonitis, or fatal gas embolism.

Reuben devoted many pages to “explaining” homosexuality, presenting his opinions on the subject as statements of fact.  “One penis plus one penis equals nothing,” he wrote. “There is no substitute for hetero-sex – penis and vagina.” . . .

The book was packed with factual errors.  “Cancer of the penis occurs only among uncircumcised men,” Reuben wrote, a statement that is simply untrue.  “Erection of the nipples always follows orgasm in the female,” he alleged.  “In spite of heaving hips, lunging pelvis, passionate groans – no nipple erection, no orgasm.  It is an accurate mammary lie detector – for those who insist on the truth.”  Reuben, unfortunately, insisted on anything but the truth.  Gore Vidal denounced Reuben in the New york Review of Books, pointing out the utterly unscientific nature of his claims.  But who was going to listen to Gore Vidal, as self-identified bisexual novelist, over a well known doctor?  Even Screw, the raunchy New York newspaper called Everything You Always Wanted to Know “the most insane book in the history of psychiatric theory.”

When challenged on the validity of his statements, Reuben was unshakeably smug.  “In psychiatry everyone is entitled to his own opinions based on his own experience.”  No matter how shoddy his science Reuben was embraced by fellow doctors as the official spokesman on sex in the seventies.  At the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, Everything You Always Wanted to Know was assigned to students taking a course sponsored by none other than the school’s Sexual Counseling Service. . . .

How could Americans in 1970 – some twenty years after the first Kinsey Report – swallow Reuben’s fallacies and outright lies?  Why didn’t the medical establishment tear him down and emend the honour of the profession?  The is no simple answer to this last question, but when it came to sex, physicians frequently sacrificed scientific objectivity for moralism and superstition.

David Allyn identifies extraordinary conservatism and little science in the medical profession’s approach to sex.  This from his 2000 book Make Love not War, The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History  Little,Brown and Company, New York:

(William) Masters and (Virginia) Johnson deserve much credit for having attempted to study bodily processes objectively and scientifically.  There were plenty of self-appointed experts running around in the late sixties and early seventies willing to make claims about sex without having done any research whatsoever.  For instance, following the success of Masters and Johnson’s books, and the subsequent flood of newspaper and magazine reports about sex therapy, medical experts discovered “The New Impotence,” a supposedly high incidence of men reporting the problem.  In October 1972, Esquire magazine quoted a member of the New York Community Sex Information telephone help line: “You get the feeling that every man in the city is impotent or sufferes from premature ejaculation.”  the journal Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality published a round table discussion on the subject in its October 1971 issue, in which four out of the five experts on the panel concurred that rates of impotence were increasing.  The clinician credited with discovering the problem, George Ginsberg, associate director of psychiatric services at New York University Hospital, cited one major cause for the trend: the new sexual assertiveness of women.  “When we explored these sexual failures, we found a common male complaint: Newly freed women demanded sexual performance.”  Apparently, sexually assertive women threatened men’s sense of masculinity.  Accordingly, women bore the responsibility for mitigating the impact of their newfound strength.

“Unconscious transmission of feminine revenge by an aggressive manner and over-assertiveness may enhance a man’s castration anxiety with consequent fear of the vagina.  This must be seen in an adaptational and social framework rather than as a purely psychological and particularly intrapsychic phenomenon.” (Ginsberg)

The New Impotence caused Ginsberg and fellow experts to reevaluate the sexual revolution.  “Although for some the new ‘sexual freedom’ may indeed be liberating, for others it merely induces different symptoms rather than improve mental health.”

Ginsberg was only one of many doctors who regarded feminism with suspicion and the sexual revolution with disdain.  Strangely enough, when it came to sex, the medical establishment as a whole was often willing to settle for ignorance and superstition instead of rigorous thought and concrete facts.  Masters and Johnson were far from model scientists, but compared to contemporaries like George Ginsberg, they had much to offer the cause of sexual freedom.  If nothing else, they gave journalists the opportunity to write about important aspects of human sexuality without euphemism or vulgarity.  Whether their own research was objective or not, Masters and Johnson increased the scientific credibility of the idea of separating fact from opinion in the study of sex.

“I’m going to say something really dangerous now,” warned panellist Jane Caro on Monday night’s Q&A. With the special “Festival of Dangerous Ideas” episode having meandered through the pedestrian topics of toy boys, single parenthood and social media bullies, it was a welcome relief.

Asked whether prostitution could be considered a deliberate career choice, Ms Caro – an author, feminist and education expert – said that marriage, in an historical context, could itself be considered a form of the ‘world’s oldest profession’.

“I would argue that traditional marriage, which included conjugal rights, particularly when women were not able to go to work or were fired when they first got married, and were basically selling their bodies and their reproductive rights to their husband…was a form of prostitution,” she said.

“He bought them, by giving her room and board in return.”

The comment caused a minor stir on social media, with some users calling the idea “stupid” and “immoral”. A rival media outlet described it as an “odd monologue” out of touch with reality.

Fellow Q&A panellist Kajsa Ekman, a Swedish author who argued against prostitution as empowerment, said Ms Caro’s comparison was “abstract”.

“We’re talking here about a world in which a lot of people in prostitution have sex with up to 15 buyers a day,” she told the Opera House audience.

“I think that [journalist turned sex worker Amanda Goff] might soon realise it wasn’t really that empowering, and that it is not representative of the majority of people who enter prostitution.

“My definition of prostitution personally is it’s sex between two people, one person that wants it and one person that doesn’t. If you don’t have that criteria you don’t have prostitution.”

Ms Caro told Fairfax Media on Tuesday that she had made a “historical analogy” rather than sought to compare modern marriage with prostitution, and did not back away from her comments.

“I talked about traditional marriage when they had conjugal rights – I didn’t mention stay-at-home housewives at all,” she said.

“And I’m sorry – I still think that historical analogy with the way marriage was [holds true]. I think in some parts of the world [marriage is] arguably not all that far away from prostitution.”

She also joked that in times gone by “if you were a prostitute maybe it lasted an hour – if you were married it lasted a lifetime”.

Ms Caro said the Q&A audience got the joke and understood the point she was making. She described her critics’ subsequent response as “a beat up”.

“I’m not surprised, tragically. I think it’s not uncommon for people to jump on something and distort it these days, which is really sad. It was, after all, a panel about dangerous ideas.”

Other feminist authors have previously made the same argument, including Sheila Jeffreys in her 2009 book The Industrial Vagina and Mary Wollstonecraft in her 1792 manifesto A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

The issue of prostitution also caused controversy at a Festival of Dangerous Ideas event on Sunday, when three Sydney sex workers handed out flyers and posed with a sign that declared: “I am a sex worker. I am not for sale.”

The demonstrators were protesting a discussion about the global sex trade in which four journalists and writers – but no actual sex workers – were invited to speak.

-by Michael Koziol  with Tom Decent
From Fairfax 2 September 2014