One of the truly bizarre aspects of the recent controversy over US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s lewd and libertine comments about women was the vehemence and violence directed at the Donald by (it seemed) Everyone In The Right-Thinking World.
The near-universal condemnation – and the ferocity that accompanied it – was truly remarkable.
Yet there was also something deeply phoney about it, even despite the fact that the best and most obvious walking advertisement for his venality seemed to be none other than the man himself.
Yes, his taped comments were puerile, crude, demeaning and offensive – of course. Uncivilised, even.
Every father with half a brain, or even only the dimmest intuition about his job in relation to his wife and children, should know that about the last kind of person he wants a son to turn out like is an approximation of the Donald.
After all, a boy raised according to the Gospel of Trump, sadly, is most unlikely to amount to a success as a man – especially for the women and children in his life, but also for our society – unless he experiences his own blinding conversion on whatever his own road to Damscus turns out to be. For such a young man, women and girls can never be anything other than a means to an end.
Yet it is precisely the obvious puerility of such attitudes to the meaning of sex and gender that western culture has for decades universally obsessed about, manufactured and appears now to be turning into authoritarian state-enforced ideology – even in the classroom.
With increasing frequency we see articles appearing everywhere in magazines, newspapers and on websites, or reports on television and radio asking what is wong with men in the 21st Century?
Yet few are willing to face the truth: many Australian men, like those in similar societies, are little more than natural products of the sexual anarchy that became pervasive through the implicit and explicit promotion over decades of pornography and the idea that sex is recreation without any commitment and minus any moral values.
In other words, the outrage directed at the Donald was actually an uncomprehending collision with reality, with the Sexual Revolution which in the Sixties demanded – and won – the severing between sex, life and commitment in marriage. Western societies were mugged by the very thing they had created and fostered.
In a surreal, Kafka-esque kind of way, this was what was so farcical about the outrage. Both the media and the popular entertainment industry (Hollywood, for example) are more guilty than almost anyone else of promoting the libertine moral relativism of the sexual revolution together with all its putrid waste.
Yet, incandescent with outrage, they were the first to demand that Mr Trump had gone so far beyond the pale he must surely withdraw as presidentially unfit for office.
Driven ever lower by the desire for greater and greater ratings and profits they have long since passed the point of being able to comprehend the damage they have done, much less care about it.
Yet, ironically, for once, the veil slipped. Confronted by the very thing they had created, they could not recognise their own image and were disgusted by what they saw.