A message for men: don’t be a dickhead

The front page of The Age’s website last Thursday made for truly gruesome reading.

Once you got past the federal election coverage, and the Essendon supplements scandal, the headlines were overwhelmingly concerned with a series of brutal crimes against women, led by the appalling case of a parolee, Jason Dinsley, who had pleaded guilty to the murder and attempted rape of a Ballarat woman in April.

When the pathetic Dinsley couldn’t get it up, he decided to take his frustration out on his victim by bashing her with a cricket bat. Her four-year-old son was in the house at the time. He already had nearly 100 prior convictions by 2007, when he was imprisoned for six years for the violent rape and robbery of a 52-year-old woman.

Scroll down a little further and there, again, was the sad case of Johanna Martin, whom no one in the media seems to be capable of resisting calling by her better-known sex worker’s handle, Jazzy O, alongside pictures of her clad in a few well-placed Australian flags.

On trial for Martin’s murder was one of her clients, who also owed her $13,000. He claims she died accidentally in a “sex game”. But he didn’t report her death. Instead he pawned her jewellery and dumped her body in the street. His defence barrister argues a paltry $13,000 wouldn’t unduly trouble a woman allegedly worth $3 million.

Such contempt.

Later in the afternoon, up popped the case of Michael Pilgrim. In a minutely planned operation, Pilgrim had abducted another sex worker, of whom he had also been a client, and imprisoned her in a house in Gippsland, where he raped her daily in the deluded belief that she might develop Stockholm Syndrome and fall in love with him.

I was starting to feel a bit sick by then, and perhaps ill-advisedly I went back to the election news. What I found was a 24-hour cycle fixated on the federal opposition leader Tony Abbott – long pilloried for his archaic attitudes to women – stating that one of his female candidates might bring a little sex appeal to his campaign.

This was disputed by former Labor opposition leader Mark Latham, who thought Abbott must have had the beer goggles on, as she wasn’t even “that good a sort”. It showed, he said, that the would-be PM had “low standards”. Actually, both men are guilty of that. But not in the way Latham presumes.

To top all this off, we had a long-serving former Prime Minister who thought anyone who felt any of this was a bit, well, problematic ought to “get a life”. Well, excuse me John Howard, and anyone else, if you think I may be drawing too long a bow in all of this. But aren’t our leaders at least supposed to set a better example?

Victorian Police Commissioner Ken Lay thinks so. In an article for the Herald-Sun just three weeks ago, he said he had something to tell you: it’s all connected. And he challenged us: “When a woman is jeered, groped, bashed or raped I want you to consider the man who did it, and the culture that encouraged it,” he wrote.

He wanted prominent men, he said, to speak about this – both loudly and more often. It had to come from the men – male politicians, corporate and sporting leaders (they are all still mostly men) – to call out the sexism that underlay the violence. And if reducing a female politician’s credentials to her appearance isn’t sexism, what is?

“The casual groping, the sick sense of entitlement, the disrespect – all of it slowly erodes our attitudes towards women,” Lay wrote. “Bit by bit our standards are lowered until this kind of behaviour becomes a form of endorsement of violence towards women.”

What was that about standards again, Mr Latham?

Then Lay gave us the statistics. In the year up to March 2013, there were nearly 20,000 recorded offences of family violence in Victoria. And in the previous two financial years, the Women’s Domestic Violence Crisis Service received more than 50,000 calls to its crisis hotline in Victoria alone.

The aforementioned headlines were all in a single day. I haven’t mentioned the cases of Jill Meagher, Sarah Cafferkey, or how Julia Gillard’s gender and appearance was used ruthlessly by her less evolved enemies to destroy her political credibility – which is not to say she didn’t inflict many wounds upon herself.

Because this is not a left/right issue, and nor is it a women’s issue. As Lay said, it’s actually a men’s issue, and a justice issue. And calling it as a man doesn’t mean forfeiting one’s masculinity, or sense of humour, or sexuality. It just means not turning a blind eye to men behaving like dickheads.