"Latham's private story is a great one about the triumph of love." Photo: Anu Kumar
There are, essentially, three kinds of newspaper columns. All three kinds cost the writer something. And all three if done well deliver something to the reader.
The first kind is the Disclosure Column. The writer gives away something precious about him or herself something that is difficult or private. The writer is paid. The reader (if it's done well) finds comfort or identification or company in the fact that someone else has oh, I don't know. Had cancer. Cheated on their spouse. Lost a child. There is always a scale of hardship involved.
Number Two in the range probably the commonest is the Pointmaker. The writer makes a point about a subject that is new, or interesting, or funny, or ventilates some new research, or puts things together in a way the reader was not expecting, and consequently enjoys. The writer is paid for the time.
Lisa Pryor. Photo: Steven Siewert
Number Three is the Fight Club kind of column. In this variety always journalism's bloodiest the writer hacks into someone or something in a fluent display that draws the gaze of everyone who either secretly or openly enjoys watching that person or thing get a bit of a kicking. At some level, that's all of us, pretty much; there's a great deal of satisfaction in waking up feeling crapped-off about four-wheel drives or Kyle Sandilands or paleo food and cracking open the newspaper to find your own thoughts translated back to you with artisanal brutality by a skilled polemicist in 1200 words.
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The writer's fee, in this case, is compensation for being thought an arse in some quarters, and for the added likely expense of blood-pressure medication.
So. Last Saturday, columnist Lisa Pryor delivered a Number One in her regular Good Weekend magazine slot.
She is asked all the time how she "manages" raising two small children with a busy husband while studying medicine full-time, and her column was about how she now chooses to answer the question: with brutal honesty.
"My secret? Caffeine and antidepressants." It was a terrific column in the way that Number Ones can be. The writer took a risk; any reader with depression, or who had at any point felt pushed to the edge of reason by the modern scourge of busyness might have felt stirred by her candour, and relieved not to be alone.
On Thursday, the Australian Financial Review's Fight Club columnist Mark Latham took Pryor's Number One, and delivered a Number Three in reply, punchily entitled "Why Left Feminists Don't Like Kids".
"Why do people like this have children in the first place? How will the children feel when they grow up and learn that they pushed their mother on to anti-depressants?" he wrote of Pryor's piece.
From the disclosed single fact (Lisa Pryor takes anti-depressants) he confidently inferred a rippling and one would have to think, at least borderline defamatory array of contentions. That Lisa Pryor hates her children. That this is typical of feminists. That this is especially true of feminists living in the inner-suburbs, outside of which quasi-infanticidal regions, according to Latham, women do not use feminism as a crutch to "free themselves of nature's way".
There followed an account of Latham's own life since leaving politics, which he has spent looking after his three children, writing columns, tending a large native garden, and cooking gourmet meals. "When I explain this reality to my male friends, they are incredibly envious. Each of them wants to swap places."
Many responses suggest themselves. Like, "Lisa Pryor might do a spot more melaleuca-mulching too, champ, were she the happy recipient of a lifetime pension". And: "Hang on. If nature's way is for women not to work, then where does that leave Mrs Latham?" (Also, less importantly but equally confusingly: "Aren't native gardens supposed to be low-maintenance?")
But the really fascinating thing is that inside this Number Three column was actually a Number One just bursting to get out. Latham's private story is a great one about the triumph of love. A man whose commitment to and enjoyment of his children is bigger than anything else in his life, he could be a passionate and fearless buster of the club mentality that still dissuades men from changing the way they work when they have children. For men, the unwritten expectation that being a good father to one's children necessarily involves being absent from them is far more oppressive than whatever stridencies an inner-city feminist might occasionally commit to the page.
But the tragedy is that this inspiring story somehow can't be told without the bloody exordium of a punch in the face for someone else. Latham closes his column with a slap at Pryor for being "cowardly: popping pills as an easy way out".
But addiction to a format can be cowardly too.
And it's pretty sad when the substance you can't kick is bile.
Annabel Crabb is the host of ABC's Kitchen Cabinet, screening 8pm Tuesdays.
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