Larry Williams Drive

The reaction on our text machine took me by surprise earlier this week.It was during The Huddle and we were talking about the Australian election I think and the number of successful independent female candidates and one of our guests used the phrase ‘pale, stale, male’.And boy did the text machine go nuts.Fair enough. Because it is an unfair generalisation.What really interested me though was that I didn’t even really notice the phrase until the texts lit up because I'm inured to it.It’s just so common nowadays to beat up on men.Which brings me to an article in the Herald today.It’s a Listener interview with the author of a book called ‘What Do Men Want” and the author Nina Power argues that it’s time that we stop this gender war.She says we have to “acknowledge that its’ possible for men to be good” which she reckons “seems to be impossible in the discourse around toxic masculinity”.Because the pervasive thinking is that "all masculinity and therefore all men is bad and it doesn’t allow room for the possibl