KEY POINTS:
The spectacle of politicians queuing up to confess they've been to strip clubs must mean something. The question is what?
Clearly, they don't expect it to do them any harm. On the contrary, given the smirking eagerness with which they owned up, you'd have to assume they see some benefit.
The trigger for these tell-alls was the revelation Australian Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd visited a New York strip club in 2003. Queensland Premier Peter Beattie was quick to play the boys-will-be-boys card, claiming it went to show that Rudd, a squeaky-clean Christian who looks like a nerdish character from the cartoon show South Park, "has blood in his veins". Rudd sought to embellish his new boofhead-friendly image by declaring he'd been drunk throughout, although the effect was tempered by the rider that he's been in that state just twice in his life.
Assuming politicians have their fingers on society's pulse, should we conclude they believe the public quietly approves of politically-incorrect, laddish behaviour from its male elected representatives because, to paraphrase Beattie, it proves they're as flawed as the rest of us?
Or perhaps they're cottoning on to the fact the public is tiring of being treated like Pavlov's dogs by the mass media. It bombards us with sexual images and promotes a hedonistic if not promiscuous lifestyle, but it expects us to snap into a posture of thin-lipped disapproval whenever it cuts a celebrity down to size with a shock-horror expose of sexual or quasi-sexual misbehaviour.
Helen Clark chose to poke her nose into the Rudd affair, saying she didn't regard strip clubs as "appropriate" entertainment. By evoking the old-fashioned notion of appropriateness, Clark, wittingly or unwittingly, aligned herself with the ageing moral minority, the generation of suffocating primness and twitching lace curtains, just as her rival was pitching for the party animal vote. Given the absurd shrillness of her Government's reaction to Air New Zealand's troop flights to Iraq, it probably shouldn't have come as a surprise: this Government is getting rather tin-eared in its old age.
I doubt Clark's comment that she was coming at it "as a woman" cut much ice either. If society is increasingly disinclined to go along with the media's hypocritical desire to have it both ways when it comes to sex, the same may apply to the female of the species.
Clark mightn't regard strip clubs as appropriate entertainment but it appears quite a lot of women do and not just those who make a living out of it. The Australian artiste, Danii Minogue, is just the latest in a long line of female celebrities who seem drawn to strip bars. The American feminist writer, Ariel Levy, has coined the term "raunch culture" to describe the phenomenon of women willingly conforming to the stereotypes of female sexuality that feminism sought to banish. For every woman who perceives sexual harassment in a bawdy joke or an explicit download, there's another who's signed up for pole-dancing lessons or wears a T-shirt with the words "porn star" emblazoned across the chest.
For some time now, there have been signs political correctness is fighting a losing battle on the sex front at least. The blurring distinction between pornography and mainstream entertainment is one sign; the growth, increasing respectability and assertiveness of the pornography industry, as exemplified by the swaggering vulgarity of Boobs on Bikes, is another.
In years to come, a recent article in New Scientist blaming fat people for global warming may be seen as a turning point in the wider war. How the Obesity Epidemic is Aggravating Global Warming advanced the thesis fat people are a large part of the problem because they use their cars more and eat carbon dioxide-intensive foods. According to the author, it's no accident the United States, the spiritual home of the lard-arse, is the worst offender per capita among the industrialised nations.
For the first time, two strands of the late 20th century liberal consensus that gave rise to political correctness are in direct conflict. In one corner, we have environmentalism which is now synonymous with the campaign against global warming; in the other we have the whole bundle of "isms" intended to eliminate discrimination on the basis of physical appearance.
There are many historical precedents for the persecution of large, big-boned or gravitationally disadvantaged people in the name of saving the planet. As the Girondist Pierre Vergniaud observed shortly before his date with the guillotine, the revolution devours its children.
