Paul Thomas: American way of life has Augusta as its guardian

The 21st century American woman can aspire to almost anything. She can be Secretary of State like Hillary Clinton, or the darling of the Republican Party like Sarah Palin. She can be Speaker of the House of Representatives like Nancy Pelosi, or a Justice of the Supreme Court like Ruth Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. She can direct the best film of the year like Kathryn Bigelow, or be the most powerful person in television like Oprah Winfrey.

One thing she cannot aspire to, however, is becoming a member of the Augusta National Golf Club.

Augusta National has around 300 members, most of whom are drawn from the top tier of corporate America. Members include the world's second and third richest men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. As an English sportswriter put it last week, "Augusta National is not so much a golf club as a bastion of power, wealth, privilege, influence, and control, an emblem and self-appointed guardian of the American way of life."

A way of life, it would seem, in which women should restrict themselves to essentially domestic or decorative roles.

On the eve of the recent US Masters tournament, which Augusta National hosts every year, club chairman Billy Payne delivered a public rebuke to serial adulterer and four times champion Tiger Woods which an approving media variously described as "solemn" and "stinging", an unusual combination.

You might find it strange or hypocritical that the head of an organisation which holds women at arm's length, if not in disdain, should go into bat for all the females whose affections Tiger has trifled with. But Payne wasn't speaking on behalf of poor Elin Nordegren or the nation's cocktail waitresses, nightclub hostesses, and porn stars through whom Woods cut such a swathe. He was speaking on behalf of himself and those like him.

"It is not simply the degree of his conduct that's so egregious here," said Payne. "It is the fact that he disappointed all of us, and more importantly, our kids and grandkids."

Payne didn't explain why a black athlete and self-made man should be answerable to a bunch of white kids born with a mouthful of silver cutlery. In the monochrome world of privilege and entitlement in which he resides, it presumably goes without saying.

Another Augusta National member is Hugh McColl jnr, a former chief executive of Bank of America, which last year needed a $64 billion bailout from the US taxpayer. In 1997, Rick Hendrick, a wealthy car dealer from McColl's home town of Bennettsville, South Carolina, was convicted of mail fraud. In 2000, McColl wrote to outgoing President Bill Clinton seeking a pardon for his buddy. A fortnight after the Bank of America Foundation announced it was donating $700,000 towards the establishment of a Clinton Presidential Library, the pardon was duly granted.

I'll leave you to guess whether the following was said by Clinton about Hendrick or by Payne about Woods: "His future will never again be measured only by his performance against par, but by the sincerity of his efforts to change."

Woods might be a tiger on the golf course, but in the jungle where the big beasts prowl, he's way down the food chain.

Augusta National isn't the only place where women are treated like another species. This week the Dominion Post ran a front page photo of 71-year-old feminist icon Germaine Greer accompanied by the stinging rebuke 'Dirty old woman'.

What had Greer done to deserve this? She'd revealed that in 1975 she had an affair with the celebrated Italian film director Federico Fellini.

The actual article, a reprint from the Daily Telegraph, has all the intellectual rigour and coherence of a cat-fight. It's a crude hatchet job which likens Greer divulging "sparse details" of her fling to the stereotypical dirty old man touching a waitress' bum.

Perhaps the only noteworthy thing about it is that it was written by a woman.

Payne and Radford notwithstanding, there's no sign of a slowdown in the ongoing sexualisation of society.

This week Tactile Minds, a pornographic magazine for the blind, was launched. The Canadian behind the venture says she got the idea after realising that the blind have been "left out in a culture saturated with sexual images". You'd have to be feeling very left out to fork over $325 for some explicit text and 17 raised images including a woman in "disco pose" and a "male love robot".

Interestingly enough, there used to be a Braille edition of Playboy. It didn't have raised images though, which goes to show that some people really did buy it for the articles.