Mrs. Martin: Son, didn’t I ever tell you there was more to life than politics and journalism? lta Buttrose, Susan Ryan and Flo Bjelke Petersen as Australia’s only foremost women, indeed. Come ‘round to tea and I’ll introduce you to Elizabeth Riddell, Elizabeth Jolley, Thea Astley, Janet Dawson, Dorothy Green, Kay Daniels, Marilyn Jones, Kath Walker, Elizabeth Evatt, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Janne King, Leonie Kramer, Mary Gaudron. But I can’t promise that they’ll agree with each other – women have an awful tendency to be individuals.

Kerry Dwyer: Dear Graeme, Jack and David, Thanks for the publicity for my forthcoming book on feminism in Carlton, Dodging the Claret Flagon.

Margaret Thatcher: I give George Negus seven out of ten for sexual attraction – ten out of ten for emotional rapport and zilch for intellectual compatibility, but apart from that it’s as good a relationship as he’s likely to find.

And so on …

The trouble is that, as in the sexual position implied by the title, there’s not much scope for female response (well, none in the book, but some women are pretty agile physically). The contributors are torn between describing a generalised stereotype of woman and talking about some people they know who happen to be female. Most try to do both, inevitably reducing even the people to objects. I really wish they hadn’t.

You, dear reader, will not be able to avoid this book. It has already been served up to fill out the new National Times on Sunday, and it is destined to fill television interviews and women’s magazines. You will discover, as I have done, that you already know more than you ever wanted to know about the marriages and love affairs of Derryn Hinch, David Williamson, George Negus, and Ray Martin. The desire of these men to publicise the intimacies of their domestic lives suggests that they have become the victims of their professions. It is not ‘I think therefore I am’, but ‘the world knows that I love, therefore I must love’. The reader, like the television viewer or playgoer, is forced to become a voyeur so that these men can know that they have an emotional life. It is a bit like watching Perfect Match – once appalled into immobility by the awfulness of the exhibitionism, you find yourself fascinated by the superficiality and human weakness displayed there.

There is superficiality aplenty in this book and a heart-tearing human weakness in the revelations within it. At first, I thought that Kevin Childs’s mistake as editor was to choose a group of men who were not very bright in the first place. Then I realised that there is an inverse proportion between the length of the interview and the sense of what was being said in it. By the time I had got through James Reyne s disjointed mutterings the real difficulty had dawned on me – Childs has asked these men to talk about a subject which interests them not a whit. Imagine a book in which Peter McNamara talked about tennis, Reyne talked about pop music, Colin Lanceley talked about painting, Morris Lurie talked about his writing and Trevor Steele talked about haircuts. It could be riveting. But women! The subject could not be less inspiring.

This is why Alex Encel and Manning Clark do relatively well. They are interested in people as part of their profession and they know that the stereotype ‘woman’ is a burden rather than a meaningful division of the human race. Not so poor Morris Lurie, who performs the service at the beginning of the book of dredging up all the resentment of the male nation against rejecting mothers and girlfriends. Lurie refers to desirable women as ‘quivering jellies’ and he sets up the extreme position, which women in Australia know too well, of woman as ‘it’.

The battle for the female pronoun not to be assumed in ‘he’ has often overlooked the existing alternative – that, for many men, ‘she’ is assumed in ‘it’. Lurie quotes a friend ‘I think I’ll kill one. I know what I’ll do, I’ll take one out to dinner, I’ll ply it with alcohol, and I’ll make sure it gets into the car and drives off. Oh, look, it wrote its car off. It’s still alive, oh dear.’ Once a person becomes an ‘it’ there is no hope for human concern or sympathy, let alone Lurie’s dream of ‘unconditional love’. Lurie condemns his friend’s account attitude seems, but it is so familiar that it seems to reflect the state of a whole society.

Dear reader, as you are sure to encounter in this book in one form or the other I can only advise you to ignore Lurie, Blundell, Martin, Reyne, Hinch, and Negus and to direct your attention to the contributions by Michael Leunig, Jack Hibberd, Colin Lanceley, Richard Divall, and Manning Clark. Leunig, Hibberd and Divall are interesting about themselves (now, there’s a title – Men on Themselves). Lanceley really tries not to be superficial and, by and large, Clark sticks to humanity. Phillip Adams admits to superficiality, then writes one of his weekly columns and David Williamson obviously had second thoughts – what other explanation can there be for the leap from: the radical feminists to life with Kristin on p.152? Williamson might be glanced through just to note his extraordinary use of the terms ‘blue-collar’, and ‘white-collar’.

On the one hand this book is an example of the modern media tempting people to expose their most private experiences for the diversion of the masses. On the other, it is a document of the superficiality and emptiness of contemporary emotional life – at least for a few friends and acquaintances of Kevin Childs. No amount of regretting that the book has been published can change the fact that our society is like that.