Not sure if you noticed, but it was International Women’s Day last week and everywhere you turned there were celebrations and scenes of joyeux.

Louis Nowra celebrated by pointing out that Germaine Greer was no longer relevant because she’d revoltingly allowed herself to get old and ugly, Helen Razer celebrated by tackling Louis Nowra to the ground and rubbing his face in his own filth, and journalists nationwide celebrated by penning many inches about bras and burqas and sticking jewels to vaginas and other such wholesome activities.

The rest of the world focused – for what seemed to be an inordinate amount of time – on the increasingly ridiculous escapades of a cricket player and a young blonde lady’s tits.

Time passed.

It would have passed in any case, though not so rapidly.

Of all the idiocy penned in the name of our apparent newfound emblem of womanhood, Lara Bingle – and oh my, there’s certainly been such a lovely, lovely amount of column inches – Peter Roebuck’s Age piece ruffled more than a few boas. And how could it not, with sweeping statements like the following:

“Restaurateurs complain about her manners and the poor company she keeps. Fashionistas talk of her headstrong ways and dubious customs. Moreover she seems intent on boosting the sales of all those magazines purchased by the female of the species. In short, she craves attention and courts controversy”

Putting aside for a moment what exactly ‘dubious customs’ might trouble ‘fashionistas’ (does Lara Bingle borrow designer clothes for evenings on the town and return them covered in gorilla semen? Intriguing.), as well as this new, thrilling judgemental crowd of restaurateurs turning their noses up at our invited dinner guests, Roebuck’s piece simply took the spotlight away from an even more charming offering from the Herald Sun’s Robert ‘Captain’ Craddock.

Holding forth on the subject of sportsman’s wives and why they don’t stop being all up in our faces with their lives and personalities and “oh look at me I have an opinion” and other such trivial flim-flammeries, Craddock sniffed:

“One of the reasons the Border/Taylor/Waugh unions clicked is that the wives played quiet, dignified supporting roles and it just seemed the perfect fit.”

Too true. They get so uppity with their desire to exist and make simple mistakes, don’t they Robert? And what a nice way to make a little pot-bellied anti-women dig without actually coming out and saying “For God’s sake when will theese bosoms with voices just simmer down and learn their place?”

In it creeps, in it creeps, the political conservatism, the edging towards a pervasive moral tut-tutting, the hate literature disguised as ‘open discussion’. First the women are to blame, then the blacks, then the homos.

It begins with our leaders and their sly blustering about politically correct ‘terms’ and ‘straight talk’, it is taken up with gusto by our media who feast with bloodied incisors, and it is parroted by our neighbours over fences and on talkback radio. Before too long we are burning people at stakes and holding the heads of demon spawn underwater lest they infest us with their AIDS flu.

Nowhere was this insidious behaviour more on display than the now infamous episode of Q and A a week ago. As Julie Bishop felled all who dared cross her with her Vader death stare (my sources inform me that the audience member who suggest she ‘answer the question’ was immediately turned into a toad or small woodlands creature), Richard Dawkins spent a not uneventful hour gazing, slack-jawed, at Australia’s own one-man travelling fun show, Steve Fielding.

Fielding appeared to have a very jolly time of the whole affair, confessing chummily to a stunned audience that not only does he believe in creationism, but “I think the Prime Minster does as well”.

Not content with dragging Kevin Rudd into the sandpit, he also stated solemnly that even though the Bible likes to demand that practicing homosexuals be sent to a bloodied death, he’s “not fearful of gays”. Gays! He actually used the word ‘gays’. Perhaps still reeling from the creationism business, nobody blinked an eye.

Tony Abbott, clearly feeling left out, later bleated in the press that while he may not be fearful, he was certainly “threatened” by the thought of a man putting a penis near another man’s bottom – quelle horreur! – and all around Australia people defended a fellow’s right to simply ‘call it’ like it ‘is’.

This is where it gets ugly, isn’t it? This is where the country’s leaders appoint themselves moral guardians, and edge around subjects with coy smiles and ‘I’m not racist, but’-type statements, never coming out and speaking their minds: ‘that hussy Bingle is entirely to blame’, ‘I hate fags’, ‘Allah Akbar’ etcetera.

And they put it out there, they set it out amongst us and let it seep. They’re well aware of it, each and every word. The ‘beauty and danger’ nonsense, the ‘gays’, the ‘dignified wives’. We watch and listen. In it goes, in it goes.