What is it about Lisa Pryor that makes Mark Latham so angry? Speaking as a male, I’m perplexed. And, also a bit surprised that the Australian Financial Review wants to continue devoting column space to Mr Latham’s unconstructed rage, but, I suppose, it’s a free press.
Lisa Pryor wrote a column in the Sydney Morning Herald, in which she disclosed the very personal fact that she has taken anti-depressants as part of her recipe to help her “enjoy the glorious disaster of raising two small children while studying medicine full time” (and writing newspaper columns). Her whole point was the power of this disclosure itself, in line with the philosophy that showing vulnerability is the best way to create real connection with other human beings. In doing so, she was of course being brave.
Clearly this triggered a very deep response in Mark Latham, because a few days later he took to the AFR with a piece titled “Why left feminists don’t like kids”, with the thesis that much of “left feminism” is built on the demonisation of children. He said many things about Pryor which she hadn’t said or implied herself, including that she finds “home-based life…pathetically menial”; that she doesn’t like her children and doesn’t want to be with them.
In the course of his attack, Latham almost incidentally dismissed the possibility that mental health may have some significance to the subject matter of parenthood generally (or for Pryor personally), choosing instead to explain that anyone, who isn’t as easily able as he is to cope with raising a young family while having a busy and important life (omitting the bit about the lifetime parliamentary pension), is just a self-obsessed, cowardly complainer.
Latham was duly pilloried in the media. He had another crack in the AFR yesterday, repeating himself in harsher words and misquoting Pryor as saying that “the only way she can cope with the nightmare of studying at university and raising children…” And so the whimsically described “glorious disaster” had become a “nightmare”.
The back-and-forth feud between Latham and his critics, in which they unhelpfully label him as a woman-hater, and he uses “feminist” like a swear word, will play itself out predictably and get us not very far. Not that Latham shouldn’t be called out for what he has written, but it isn’t like he’s going to change his mind or that the AFR is going to stop publishing him. He obviously sells papers.
I just don’t get what generated this heat in the first place. By all accounts Lisa Pryor is a lovely person and she didn’t express antipathy towards anyone in her original column – least of all her own children. Clearly she pressed a button for Latham and his anger at her is genuine; it’s so palpable it has to be.
What I wonder is whether the fact that Pryor chose to talk about vulnerability as a positive social value, and make a personal disclosure to illustrate the point, is what in reality triggered such a violent response. It’s easy to read Latham’s two replies as a shut-down, as an unconscious demonstration by a guardian of the gender status quo of what happens to those who dare to be vulnerable.
Speaking as a man, I have seen and know well the impulse many men have to shut down any display of emotional openness. To them, it’s the most threatening thing of all. And the way some men deal with a threat is to shout at it.