Dear Taxpayer, I weep for thee. 

The ABC started this week with an article titled ‘Is fragile masculinity the biggest obstacle to climate action?’ I have read some inane headlines in my time, but this drivel summitted unfathomable depths of stupidity. 

Megan Mackenzie a professor of Gender and War at Sydney University (insert eyeroll here), hypothesises that men who like fast cars, and therefore fossil fuels, are climate change deniers, yada yada, and we’re all going to die. She bags out eating meat, ladysplains that we shouldn’t be mean to beta males and hypothesises how – get this –  ‘we need to change our thinking to call out fossil fuel extraction and climate denialism as a pathetic expression of petro power and masculinity’. Are you weeping for humanity yet? Because by this point, I’d lost the will to live. 

Being a litigation lawyer by profession, I’m generally pretty good at distilling an argument down to its fundamentals. But other than the spewing of misandrist bile, all I managed to glean from this article was that the sun sets in the west therefore all goats are blue. The concept that the planet is going to burn because masculine men are somehow ’fragile’ because they use meat and fast cars as a status symbol is an argument so deficient and so poorly formulated it makes Project Barbarossa seem like a cracking idea. 

Pertinently, this diatribe was written by a person, educated by the taxpayer, who works a taxpayer-funded job, and who was published by a taxpayer-funded media outlet. And after I recovered from my whiplash-inducing head–shake, I found myself genuinely sympathising with tax evasion. Why would you work hard and pay tax when this is the ‘dividend’ produced after the ‘operational expenses’ are accounted for. My primary takeaway from the *cough* article was that the Aussie taxpayer gets screwed more than your average Bangkok hooker. 

And while it was hard enough wading through a 790–word article written by this professor, my thoughts turned to the horrific notion of actually being taught and graded by her.

Well, if nothing else, at least you’d walk away knowing how to roll your own tampons. 

Caroline Di Russo is a lawyer, businesswomen and unrepentant nerd.

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