It's worth taking a moment to dwell on the "defence" #Leyonhjelm is gradually constructing in his media appearances.
Remember that #Leyonhjelm generally has 3 countermoves:
a) appeal to a Back-of-the-Cornflakes-box version of libertarianism
b) impugning the motives of opponents (because he genuinely can’t understand moral motives other than individual preference-maximisation)
c) name-calling
a) appeal to a Back-of-the-Cornflakes-box version of libertarianism
b) impugning the motives of opponents (because he genuinely can’t understand moral motives other than individual preference-maximisation)
c) name-calling
Now his “misandry” nonsense might look like a mix of b) and c). But in fact he’s starting to put together a version of a). And it’s telling why he might need to do so.
#Leyonhjelm seems (genuinely, if rather stagily) angry that he thinks Senator Hanson-Young was saying or implying ‘all men are rapists.’ I’m sure she wasn’t, but in his mind pointing that out is not going to be enough to motivate an apology. Why?
Because what he wants is for everyone else to endorse the very specific, very flawed view of the human condition that libertarians depend upon.
Remember that one of those Sky chuckleheads finished their now-notorious slot by thanking him for defending “the individual against the sludge of the collective”. That’s where this ‘misandry’ defence is going.
#Leyonhjelm insists he takes people as individuals, and that it would be a sexist generalization to say that women need to defend themselves from men, as opposed to defending themselves from "people" per se.
And on one level, who could possibly object to treating people as individuals instead of stereotypes? The problem is that ‘treat people as individuals’ becomes shorthand for ‘ignore what comes into view when you pan out a bit.’
So you might still notice the distinctively gendered nature of various forms of violence, but you can’t see that datum as anything other than a mysterious fact about the net effect of thousands of isolated, independent, deliberate choices by free agents.
And that in turn means you can’t ask things like ‘why is it always men doing this?’ – a question that gets uncomfortable, because it calls two things into question.
First, it calls into question your ability to say “Well, I'm fine: this isn’t about me.” Because “I don’t commit these acts” isn’t the same thing as “I don’t participate in the ideas and practices that cause these acts to happen in the patterns that they do”
And secondly, it calls into question your conception of yourself as a self-transparent, rational agent immune to social conditioning. Once you admit our ideas about masculinity might be a problem, the whole anthropology that libertarianism depends upon starts taking on water.
So watch for a lot more of this sort of move from #Leyonhjelm. Because he’s quite clearly not going to realise, let alone admit, how wrong he is.
As an aside: if you're wondering why I've written so much about Leyonhjelm over the last few years? Because he at least tries to give some sort of theoretical basis. Grappling philosophically with Turnbull or Shorten is like assembling flatpack furniture made of pudding.
Which, incidentally, doesn't make them bad politicians. You can have phronesis without clear, internally consistent, articulated principles; indeed, sometimes the latter can hinder the former.
