Talking with an old friend recently about relations between the sexes, I said men these days don’t know if they’re Arthur or Martha. My friend’s name is Keny with one ‘n’, which he considers a mark of distinction bestowed by his parents. He is an academic and I value the friendship partly because he is a rare bird of the left who can maintain a conversation with someone who holds differing views.

Keny was of the opinion that ‘once again’ my comment was misconceived and that I was over-complicating things. In matters of romance, he said, if two persons feel a mutual attraction, have been transparent with each other about their gender identities and have given each other an unequivocal consent, they are at liberty to proceed to amorous relations. Besides, he added, not knowing whether you’re Arthur or Martha is a noble trait, one to aspire to, although the names ‘Arthur’ and ‘Martha’ are out of fashion these days, ‘a bit like yourself’.

But our friendship came under unexpected strain following my suggestion that Keny join me at my local for Friday happy hour. I never anticipated the events that would ensue. My intentions were nothing other than to have a drink with my friend at the end of another long week and for him to meet a few good people, and through the first half hour, all went well. As I introduced Keny to some of the front bar regulars, he commented approvingly on their ethnic and economic diversity and was pleasantly surprised, he said, to find them to be articulate. But sitting at the bar, quiet and alone, with his customary stoic demeanour and look of self-satisfaction, was a somewhat elderly man.  ‘Oh, that’s just Harold,’ said Katarina, a solicitor and barrister who was beside us. ‘When he was a sixteen-year-old at school, he was seduced by his young female maths teacher.’

Keny fell mute, a sadness coming over him. ‘Oh my’, he eventually said, his voice cracking, ‘how horrific. The poor, scarred soul.’ He said that his heart bleeds for all victims of predatory abuses of power, and, fighting back tears, turning from myself to Katarina, he asked if Harold had received adequate post-traumatic counselling and whether he or his guardians had sought legal redress. But, rolling her eyes, Katarina raised her hand to silence him. ‘Listen up, Keny with one ‘n’, you’re going down the wrong rabbit hole. In this part of the world, any schoolboy who scores his teacher is a legend for life − and that’s our Harold.’ Katarina explained further that Harold doesn’t like it being brought up these days, out of modesty, although he had asked her to speak at his 80th later in the year and she will give it a mention then.

Never before had my friendship with Keny encountered such a clear and present danger. For years, I had suffered his intellectual elitism, his moral airs, his immunity to humour, his antipathy to biological males of Anglo appearance and his enmity towards his own country, all in keeping with my mantra of prioritising friendship over politics, but, unwittingly, I had brought on a flashpoint. Searching the bar for a sympathetic leftie face and finding none, Keny asked why I had brought him here, accusing me of having introduced him to a regressive cult. He described Harold as something resuscitated from an archaeological dig and said that all of the most despicable qualities of the male half of the species, qualities which he thought had long since been excised from the human condition, were concentrated in this one… ‘rabbit hole’.

‘It’s the same at the Exchange down the highway,’ Mandy, a piano teacher, chimed in. ‘Any pub’, added Ivanka, an international air steward and cabin manager, ‘and not just in Australia.’

As a stony-faced Keny stood listening to the conversation around him, my hopes that our friendship would survive this day faded fast. Vesna, a principal of a high school, related how an incident of this nature had been the best thing that ever happened to her school. There had been a huge spike in enrolment demand, with hundreds applying from outside the zone on compassionate grounds. Arav, a journalist, said that the no-holds-barred exposé he had written about the incident at Vesna’s school had received more clicks than any other article published by his outlet in five years. ‘It should have had me in the running for a Walkley.’ Krystian, a child psychologist who had a contract with the Education Department to provide counselling services for all manner of cases, said his practice had been flourishing. I suggested to him that, with respect to the particular category of incident under discussion, there must be a certain proportion of teenage boys whose mental wellbeing is genuinely impaired, but he declined to answer, citing doctor-patient privilege.

The end was nigh when Raj, who works in guttering and stormwater, pointedly accused Keny of having a maudlin perspective on life, one mired in misery and melancholy. This prompted Keny to place his white wine on the bar and walk out. I followed him outside and, thinking on my feet, knowing it was my last chance to salvage the situation, I suggested that he draw on his experiences over this last hour to write an academic paper. It could be an evidence-based discussion of past societal attitudes and how, in certain climatic conditions, tensions between the old and new can cause a cultural combustion by which they are teleported through time. ‘Developed under your hand,’ I said, ‘I’m sure such a paper would pass peer-review and be accepted by a AAA journal.’

With this, a touch of warmth returned and, after I extended my apologies for what had happened, Keny offered an olive branch. Our decades-old mateship could continue, he said, provided I conceded that his views on these matters are timeless truths. I acquiesced, without telling him that more than ever, in the old-fashioned sense of the phrase, I did not know whether I was Arthur or Martha.