A useful rule of thumb for politicians, though one that many of them conscientiously ignore, is “do not try to be ‘down with the kids’”. The modern media environment simultaneously encourages such behavior and ruthlessly punishes it: the politician desperate for attention seeks internet virality by performing the latest meme and then is ruthlessly mocked for appearing square and uncool. Only the chosen few, blessed with uncommon charisma, can even think about pulling it off: Barack Obama, for example.
The latest politician to learn this the hard way is Australia’s painfully boring – nothing wrong with that in a politician – prime minister, Anthony Albanese, who was somehow convinced by his crack team of special advisers to go onto an Australian comedy podcast with the not particularly subtle double-entendre name of Bush Deep, hosted by the female comedian Nikki Osborne, who performs under the alter ego of “Bushy”.
For 13 minutes or so, it all went well. Albanese was able to make some jokes. Appear relaxed. Even approachable. The special advisers will have been very happy.
Disaster Strikes for Unsuspecting PM
Then disaster struck.
At 13 minutes in, Albanese was asked to play a game that all guests on the podcast are invited to partake in: “shag, marry, date” – the premise being that the names of three women are provided and the appropriate activity should be assigned to each in order of preference. Albanese was asked to choose between Australian pop icon Kylie Minogue, actress Nicole Kidman and an Australian actress less familiar to European or American audiences called Rhonda Burchmore.
Albanese gamely tried to avoid the question, showing at least a degree of political instinct, by pointing out that he had been recently married. Alas, his host refused to permit him to escape the question, and Albanese – walking into a trap that may as well have had “ACME politician trap” written on it, cartoon-style – leapt in with both feet.
Kylie Minogue, he announced, was his preference for all three activities. (The unfortunate moment comes at 13:50 into the video.)
Albanese’s decision, as a heterosexual man, to express sexual attraction towards Kylie Minogue, naturally resulted in an orgy of outrage, though strangely not for his apparent slight toward Kidman and Burchmore.
No, the outrage was that he had expressed desire for Minogue so casually. For that crime, opposition figures called him disrespectful. Female media figures lamented his chauvinism. Liberal MP Sarah Henderson said that the comments were “disrespectful to women, embarrassing to Australians, and demean the office of prime minister”, while independent MP Zali Steggall said that it was “entirely inappropriate for the prime minister to participate in such a game” and that the prime minister should have pushed back on the question and described such a game as demeaning and sexist to women – though it should be noted that female versions of that game, featuring three male choices, have been popular online for years.
Of course, Albanese was put in a no-win position, because he had broken the cardinal rule about attempting to be trendy.
The No-Win Game
Consider the alternative: had the prime minister simply refused to answer or denounced the game as sexist, as some of his critics wished, he would have inevitably faced charges of either being no fun or perhaps even being blind or inauthentic. He is hardly the first male to express attraction to Minogue – a significant part of whose appeal throughout her career has been her appeal to the male gaze.
Indeed, the entire objective of the exercise, when advisers put their charges onto comedy podcasts and similar platforms, is to make the politician seem like “a normal bloke”. Does the “normal bloke” respond to queries about Kylie Minogue’s attractiveness by expressing feminist annoyance at the existence of the question?
On the other hand, by answering, Albanese also earned himself ire: precisely because his advisers succeeded in presenting him as a “normal bloke” while forgetting that, in the current era, being a “normal bloke” is about the worst thing a politician could be. And there he was, the left-wing prime minister of Australia, expressing sexual attraction towards a woman who had never consented to be observed by him in such a primal and one-dimensional way. This, in the eyes of many of the left-wing feminists who had powered his party to electoral victory and therefore Albanese himself to office, was close to a primal betrayal.
Honestly, a guy can’t win.
The Shifting Standards for Male Attraction
Here is the thing: besides going on the podcast in the first place and attempting to appear relatable and human, Albanese did nothing wrong.
Note well that he did not say anything inherently sexual about Minogue: he made no specific comments on her appearance. Nor did he confine himself to the most primal of the three options he was offered, instead diplomatically expressing a desire to both date and marry the pop star, which might suggest to any reasonable mind that his interest in her was not exclusively of the most debauched kind. No, Albanese is a victim, in this instance, of a disease afflicting feminist discourse on the left.
In recent years, feminism has somehow permitted justified outrage at male sexual misbehavior toward women – a real problem – to be transformed into a general hostility to any kind of unsolicited “male gaze”, where the complaint is that by noticing a woman’s appearance, the man – only if he approves of that appearance – is guilty of “objectifying” a woman. Opposition to sexual misbehavior has become opposition to sexual attraction in the round.
In this new paradigm, a man is expected to be deaf, blind and dumb to the existence of attractive women unless and until he is certain that his very attraction is desired and consented to – an impossible standard, at least until humanity develops telepathic powers. As such, Albanese has, in the words of his critics, demeaned the office of prime minister simply by being a normal heterosexual male while holding it.
In that sense, his folly in breaking the golden rule of remaining boring has at least given the world a valuable lesson about the unacceptability of normal male instincts in public life. And should, perhaps, generate some pushback.
There is one complicating factor in all of this: Albanese is a left-winger, and therefore the right in Australia has not been particularly interested in defending him, largely out of a sense that it is amusing to observe somebody woke getting hoisted by his own petard. That instinct is understandable, but a mistake. The more the left are able to exclude normal human activity and behavior from the political realm, the weirder the political realm will become.
Albanese might be a wokester himself, but even he should be defended on this occasion.
