social commentator Bettina Arndt has never been ... - David Leser

What
men Want
in bed
social commentator Bettina Arndt has
never been afraid to ask provocative
questions – particularly when it comes to
Australians’ bedroom behaviour. Here, the
passionate author talks to david Leser about
her new book and her controversial opinions.
Let’s not be too prudish about
this. Bettina Arndt has always
loved penises, particularly
erect ones. She says so, gaily
and quite matter-of-factly, a
few minutes into our interview, as though
the subject under discussion were radio
technology or the enchanted flight of the
Monarch butterfly.
“I’ve always been fascinated by
erections,” she trills, “because, I suppose,
30 years ago, in the brief period when I
was actually a sex therapist, sitting there
with me were men who were so heartbroken
about the fact that they weren’t getting
erections anymore.
“And in those days, we knew nothing
about erections. We didn’t know what
happened, how it worked, what caused
it to stay up. Nothing.”
Now we do and, for Bettina, the scientific
advances are amazing, thrilling, especially
given that so many men seem to have
erectile dysfunction as they get older.
Bettina knows this from the research,
but also from what men tell her. They tell
her with stunning frankness how they
can’t get hard anymore, or if they can,
how they can’t keep it that way. They
share with her the fact that their wives
often don’t stroke them properly – she
uses only one hand when two would be
so much better. They tell her what orgasm
is like after a prostatectomy. (It’s dry!)
They tell her about the length of their
penis, their struggle with premature
ejaculations, the hypersensitivity of the
glans after ejaculation. They send photos,
emails, diary entries. They offer up their
anguish, their hunger, their longing.
CORBis.
MODERN LIFE
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“fEd Up WiTH sTUdying
‘RATs And sTATs’ ...
BETTinA TURnEd HER
fOCUs TO sEx. sOOn,
sHE WAs knOWn As
‘THE dR sEUss Of HEAvy
BREATHing’.”
I began to lose erections. I was utterly
devastated and brokenhearted. It is one
thing to lose a lover, but it seemed to me
that I had lost me. It was as if the most
important part of me had died.
And whereas most men feel they can’t
discuss their shrinking manhood with
their wives and partners, they seem to want
to pour their hearts out to this stranger
who, in truth, is no stranger at all.
Bettina Arndt first burst
into our bedrooms nearly
40 years ago as the editor
and then publisher of Forum,
the Australian adult sex
education magazine, launched by the
late caftan-wearing Clyde Packer. The
magazine was bold and provocative,
just like its founding editor.
For her first appointment with Packer,
she arrived half an hour late because,
according to Packer at the time, she’d
been “trying to make flashers expose
themselves to her in Centennial Park”.
On one occasion in Broken Hill, with
Wendy McCarthy, the then ABC deputy
chair, she began interviewing a group
of miners about their sex lives. “[She
wanted to know] how long they lasted
before ejaculating,” Wendy said, “whether
their wives were happy with the
experiences. These guys didn’t know
what had dropped out of the sky.”
Born in 1949, in England, the
youngest of three children, Bettina was
22 and working as a Hertz Rent-a-Car
girl in Sydney when she first read
Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.
The book lit a fuse inside her head.
Spurred on by Greer and the 1960s
sexual revolution, fascinated by the
new Masters and Johnson research
into the wonders of the human orgasm,
fed up with studying “rats and stats”
for her psychology degree, Bettina
turned her focus instead towards sex.
Soon, she was known as “the Dr Seuss
of heavy breathing”.
Clockwise from top left: bettina arndt
in the early ’70s; with her son, Jesse, in
1982; a 1978 cover of Forum magazine;
with second husband Warren Scott and
Jesse in 1987, in new York; reinvented
as a men’s advocate in 2010; with her
first husband, dennis minogue, in 1980.
4 | AWW.COM.AU OCTOBER 2010 | 5
pHOTOgRApHy By HUgH sTEWART. ACp syndiCATiOn. ROBERT BUTCHER/ACp syndiCATiOn.

In the years since Forum’s
closure in 1981, Bettina went
on to enjoy a stellar career as a
columnist, television and radio
broadcaster, feature writer (including
for this magazine) and author and public
speaker on a range of social and gender
issues. Often her views were controversial,
particularly as they challenged the
accepted wisdoms of the sisterhood,
which they often did.
In 1993, as a guest reporter for
ABC’s Four Corners program, she
enraged many feminists by challenging
the “party line” that “no must always
mean no” in sexual assault cases. She
felt the lines were more blurred than
that, that for some women, no didn’t
always mean no. Sexual assault
counsellors were appalled.
“We feel that there was in that
program a strong revisitation of the
myth that sexual assault results when
a woman is not clear about saying
‘no’,” said one joint letter from seven
counsellors. “It is our experience from
counselling many, many women after
they have been raped, that in most
instances, they don’t get a chance to
say ‘no’. There is no negotiation phase.”
More recently, Bettina ignited a
furious response with an article in The
Sydney Morning Herald questioning
Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s unmarried,
childless status and whether this could
“influence other women into making big
mistakes about their lives”.
“iT’s THE WOMEn WHO
End Up sTRAndEd
WHEn THEy spEnd
yEARs ... WAiTing fOR
MR nOT REAdy OR
MR MAyBE TO MAkE Up
His Mind.”
“It’s the women who end up stranded,”
Bettina wrote, “when they spend years
in a succession of de facto relationships
waiting for Mr Not Ready or Mr Maybe
to make up his mind. Women’s tiny
reproductive window means they pay a
high price for wasting precious breeding
time in such uncertain relationships.”
Bettina then widened her aperture to
include “well-known Australians making
dubious lifestyle decisions being lauded
in the media – celebrities choosing to
become single mothers, unwed fathers,
parents dragging children through a
succession of chaotic, ‘blended’ families.
“Pat Rafter was made Australian of
the Year [in 2002] just as he was about
to become an unmarried father,” she
lamented. “What did that say to his
many male fans about the importance
of committed fathering?”
You could hear the crackle and
thunder of derision. “Get a life, Bettina,”
wrote one irate correspondent. “What
a foolish, anachronistic article,” said
another. “Ridiculous, rubbish, a bad
joke from the 1950s,” chimed a third.
“Put your head in the oven, you old
bag,” chorused another. There were
hundreds more like it.
“The Herald has never seen a
response like that,” Bettina says
now. “I’ve never had such abusive
letters personally.”
And not just from letter writers.
Catherine Deveny, penning an article for
ABC Online, said, “How can I put this?
The woman has done the unthinkable.
Made Cardinal Pell and Sheikh Al
Hilaly’s views on women seem modern.
Scary enough if you think of Arndt, as
many do, as a feminist. I’m not sure
she is. She describes herself as a sex
therapist and a social commentator …
I can confidently describe her as an
uptight white honkie.” (Bettina is just
as scathing about Catherine Deveny!)
Bettina Arndt greets me at
the door of her Sydney
home, on a glorious late
winter morning, with an
outstretched hand and a
light peck on the cheek. In her grey
jeans, pink top and tanned, lean frame,
she is, at the age of 61, a picture of
feminine self-possession.
This is our first meeting, although
we’ve spoken previously by phone,
the last occasion to arrange this
interview. During that conversation,
she was nothing if not frank, advising
me of her upcoming colonoscopy and
suggesting I pay particular attention
to the five chapters of her latest book
on erections.
Continued on page 318.
CORBis.
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What men Want in bed COntinUed ...
The interview begins agreeably
enough, when I ask her why she’s
spent so long in the thrall of men’s
sexual proclivities. “I’ve always been
interested in men,” she replies. “I
suppose, for many, many years, I’ve
been interested in sex.”
You mean you like it? “I like it,” she
says, with great emphasis. “I like it. I
remember the first penis I ever saw.
I had this first true love. I was 17 and
thinking, ‘My God, that’s amazing’. I’ve
always thought it’s the most wondrous
thing. And it is. The more you learn
about the penis, the more you think
it’s extraordinary. It’s this intricate
mechanism. And I thought it was the
most beautiful thing.”
Bettina has always been plain
speaking – in the past, she has written
about her own “sluggish ovaries”, her
husband’s “vital deposits”, the inserted
“thermometer”, the “broken condom”
that would produce the “miracle of
conception” of her first child – so it
seems fair enough to ask her whether
the clitoris might be just as remarkable
as the penis, if not more so. “That’s
true,” she says. “The clitoris is pretty
amazing, too.”
Yet you’ve been bewitched by the
penis? “Look, I’ve been very oriented
towards men all my life because I grew
up with two older brothers and I spent
my life running after them, wanting to
be part of their play.”
Bettina once lovingly described her
first husband, The Age journalist and
her business partner Dennis Minogue,
as a “Neanderthal” and she says now
there is still part of her “that is attracted
to that sort of man”. (Dennis Minogue
died, suddenly, in 1981, at the age of
37, leaving Bettina as a single mother to
their then five-month-old son, Jesse.)
Her second husband, American
lawyer, Warren Scott, whom she married
in 1986 and had two children by, Taylor,
now 22, and Cameron, 19, once referred
to his wife as “terribly un-reconstructed”
in her relationship to men. (The couple
was divorced three years ago.)
Bettina doesn’t deny her male bias.
“Probably [true],” she says, “because
I’m not at all sure that it’s been in the
interests of men and women to try to
shape men entirely in terms of the sort
of men women want.”
All good so far. The conversation
turns frosty, however, when I raise the
recent Herald article on Julia Gillard
and Patrick Rafter’s lifestyle choices.
Did she not think her story overly
judgemental? “I’ve written that story a
dozen times,” she says, stiffly, “the story
about the fact that there are certain
problems with cohabitation.”
What problems? “There is nothing
wrong with living together,” she says.
“I’ve spent years of my life living with a
man and I would do it again, maybe. I
would never marry again, but I would
certainly live with someone again.
“There’s certainly no problem for
a woman of Gillard’s age living with
someone. The only problem for women
comes if they want to have children
and they end up living with a man
for long periods during, particularly
their 30s, where they haven’t spelt
out whether they have the same
expectations of a relationship.
“And then they may find themselves
in a situation where they miss out on
that critical narrowing window of
opportunity to have children. And I
have had hundreds of letters from
people who say, ‘You are quite right
about that’.”
So you’re promoting marriage as
the way to secure having a child? “No,
I’m saying if women want to have
children, as most do … the difference
between marriage and cohabitation
is the question you ask at the beginning
of a relationship.
“I didn’t make this idea up,” she
continues, heatedly. “The Institute
of Family Studies did research on
cohabitation, where they find that,
at the start of cohabitation, what
differentiates cohabiting relationships
from marriage are the discussions
around expectations. And in many de
facto relationships, many people don’t
sit down at the start and say, ‘Are you
interested in a permanent relationship?’
‘Are you interested in children?’ ”
Bettina’s bottom line is that
“family structure matters” and that
all the research proves de facto
relationships are “less stable than
marital relationships”.
When I question this further, Bettina
yells indignantly from the kitchen – over
the froth and steam of the cappuccino
machine – that child support agencies
confirm what she is saying, “that married
fathers are more likely to support their
kids than de facto, financially”.
I ring the Child Support Agency
in NSW after our interview and its
spokesman says, “It is our job to
facilitate the transference of money
between parents for the benefit of
children. We are not in the business
of relationships and whether they are
stable or not. I don’t know where she
is getting that from.”
I check then with Relationships
Australia (NSW). Anne Hollonds,
chief executive officer, suspects
Bettina is right in saying de facto
relationships are probably less
stable than marriages. However,
75 per cent of people who marry
start off living together anyway.
Anne also points out that de facto
relationships of two years or more
now have the same legal standing
as marriages.
“I have worked with a lot of married
couples,” she says, “and they often hit
a wall because one thought the other
agreed to have children and they find
out, five years later, that they didn’t.
So, I am much more interested in how
we work effectively to turn a romantic
relationship into a partnership. Getting
a marriage certificate isn’t necessarily
going to do that.”
Bettina returns from the kitchen with
our cappuccinos. The froth is nearly
overflowing and, by her own admission,
she is “pissed off”. With this interviewer,
not the coffee machine.
I press on. Why take aim at Patrick
Rafter’s commitment to fathering simply
because he was unmarried at the time?
“I was interested not in his choice,” she
says, “but in the choice of making him
Australian of the Year, when Australian
of the Year has to be all about values
and admirable lifestyle.”
I suggest this is a very conservative
position to adopt. She counters by saying
there are millions of fathers who have
disengaged from their children. I agree
with her, but ask whether this might not
apply to men, married or not. No, she
says, it’s far less likely with married men.
Then she erupts when I question again
the social science research she’s relying
on to prosecute her arguments. “I don’t
think there’s any point in talking to you,”
she says. “Nothing I say is going to
convince you.”
The coffee’s turning cold.
Bettina Arndt was probably
programmed to argue. Her
beloved father was the famous
German-born economist,
Heinz Arndt, who resigned
from the Australian Labor Party over
Gough Whitlam’s decision to go to China
in 1973. A public intellectual and linguist,
he loved the thrust and parry of ideas.
In his latter years, he moved
increasingly to the right of the political
spectrum, much to the dismay of his
wife, Ruth, Bettina’s mother, who as a
teenager, was forced to flee the Nazis
after writing an anti-Nazi paper for her
“i AM THis pARTiCULAR
LOnE vOiCE ... BECAUsE
iT JUsT dRivEs ME nUTs
THAT nO OnE is
pREsEnTing THE MALE
pOinT Of viEW.”
final exams. Ruth was smuggled out of
Germany in a fishing boat to England,
where she was taken in by a Quaker
family. She won a scholarship to the
London School of Economics, before
earning a degree in social work. She
met her husband while helping families
recover from the London bombing.
Both parents were “extraordinary,
amazing” people, but her mother suffered,
in her later years, from the sense of
having never fully realised her potential.
Their home was often “a battleground”
of competing ideas and interests.
I ask Bettina whether the “deep bond”
she shared with her father might have
shaped her benign view of men (read
“obsessively apologist” view, to some of
her detractors) and she agrees this is
“probably true”.
This pro-male bias was brought into
sharp relief three years ago, with the
publication of The Sex Diaries, Bettina’s
raw and intimate account of 98 couples’
bedroom behaviour. The pages were
bathed, particularly, in male anguish
and frustration at being sexually rejected
by partners whose libidos were far more
“distractable and fragile”.
“Here were these men,” says Bettina,
“who would ask again and again, and try
and plead and grovel and cook the dinner,
whatever they thought was going to work
to get the green light, and they got knocked
back again and again and again.”
Bettina’s advice to both men and
women – but mainly women – was
for them to “get over that ideological
roadblock of assumptions about desire
and ‘just do it’ ”. “Once the canoe is in
the water, everyone starts happily
paddling,” she said.
Now, Bettina’s new book, What Men
Want – In Bed, lifts the lid further on
men’s fears, frolics and frustrations,
and why it is that sex matters so much
to them. She quotes American author
Philip Roth as saying, when he turned
70, “Nothing is put to rest, however
old a man may be”.
For this latest book, more than 150 men
kept diaries about what it is like to live
with the all-consuming sexual itch.
There is the 71-year-old virgin who never
finds the right woman, so he puts himself
on medication to reduce his sex drive.
There is the man who leaves his wife
after being denied sex for 19 years.
There is another – a pensioner –
who, with his wife’s approval, enjoys
wearing her knickers under his
bowling shorts.
There are the men who turn to
pornography as a consolation prize for
being continually refused sex. There are
the happily married men who, instead
of taking up golf on retirement, turn to
other men for occasional dalliances. And,
of course, there are the countless men
with penile problems, for whom Bettina
provides heartfelt and current advice.
Bettina believes the social debate has
been dominated by women for more than
30 years and, quite frankly, she’s sick of
it. It’s the reason she finds herself regularly
drawn, “like a moth to the flame”, to the
battle of ideas, just as her father once was.
“The whole point is we wouldn’t be
here if my voice wasn’t really unusual,
defending men,” she says now. “That’s
why we’re having this discussion. And
what does that say? It says that the barrage
is from the other side, the barrage of
calling men to account for their behaviour,
for telling them off for what they’re doing
… that’s the message that’s been out
there for almost 30 years.
“And I am this peculiar lone voice …
because it just drives me nuts that no
one is presenting the male point of view.”
After two hours of sometimes fierce
debate, the mood finally softens and
Bettina takes me to her upstairs office
to show me her “Peter Metre”, the
contraption she keeps on her desk that
measures the rigidity of a man’s penis.
Designed by the manufacturers of
Viagra, it is a spherical rubber object
divided into four sections (1,2,3,4) of
varying hardness, so that the doctor
can rate the man’s level of stiffness.
“Feel them all and you will see,”
she says.
That’s hard, I say, squeezing number
3. “Yeah.”
That one (number 2) is a bit softer.
“Yeah … so what is your typical penis?”
You’re not asking me, are you? “No,”
she replies, laughing. “I could.”
It’s obviously number 4. “Of course,
it is. Completely hard and fully rigid.
There you are. Isn’t that clever? I think
it’s very clever.”
Yes, it is, but I’m sure it’s time to go. n
What Men Want – In Bed by Bettina Arndt,
published by Melbourne University Press,
$34.99, is available now.
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