Opinion
If you’ve never been to Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), well… you’re not missing much. Well, that’s not entirely true: you’re missing an architecturally stunning building — filled with absolute, overpriced tat. I’ll give owner David Walsh credit for giving back to the local community, at least (Tasmanian residents get in free), even if it runs at a loss. I suspect, like Charles Foster Kane, Walsh is sanguine about losing so much money that he’ll go broke in sixty years.
Walsh is no stranger to seeking out controversy, either. His annual “Dark MOFO” festival of Terribly Edgy Posing is at least guaranteed to get a few column inches in the Mercury (aka, “The Mockery”, to locals). But a new controversy has landed his wife in court — and turned the feminists’ tables back on them.
Hobart’s popular Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) could be forced to shut down a women’s-only Ladies Lounge created by Kirsha Kaechele, the wife of the museum founder David Walsh, if an anti-discrimination case launched by a male lawyer is successful.
“This is not a classic case of equal opportunity, is it?” the deputy president of the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, Richard Grueber, observed on Tuesday, as a hearing into the matter got underway.
After all, we’re still constantly barraged with flappy-armed frightbats screeching about the vanishing few men-only clubs left, or boys-only schools, or any space where men just want to spend an hour or two away from the fishwife din. But when it’s them doing it, well, that’s different.
Appearing via video link from New South Wales was the complainant, Mr Jason Lau, who in April last year visited Mona, only to find that he was denied entry into the Ladies Lounge, a luxurious exhibition space featuring art from the likes of Picasso and Sidney Nolan, because of his gender. Mr Lau, representing himself, argued at Tuesday’s hearing in Hobart that the Ladies Lounge contravened Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Act.
So, men are excluded from about the only room in the whole building which has actual art, instead of modern bilge like the infamous poo machine (I shit you not, no pun intended).
“I visited Mona, paid $35, on the expectation that I would have access to the museum, and I was quite surprised when I was told that I would not be able to see one exhibition, the Ladies Lounge,” Mr Lau told the hearing. “Anyone who buys a ticket would expect a fair provision of goods and services.”
And you just know the feminists know they’re talking absolute bullshit, when they have to reach back half a century to try and justify their bigotry.
Reading from her witness statement, Kaechele pointed out that it was only in 1965 that Australian women won the right to drink in a public bar, and before that, they were required to sit in a small area – the so-called ladies lounge – where they would often be charged more for their drinks.
So, women have been perfectly able to drink in a public bar for my entire lifetime. What is this silly bint’s point, then?
Especially when she sails right on and panders to the second-most misogynist ideology of our time.
“[It] presented the opportunity to make a space for the gathering of women, and when I say women, what I mean is anyone who identifies as a woman,” Kaechele said.
The Age
So, as per Tasmanian law (thanks, gay marriage!), any hairy beefcake with a swinging set of donkey tackle can stump up to the counter, bellow in his gravelly basso that “It’s ma’am!” and go right on and manspread in the Ladies Lounge.
Way to score a goal for the fairer sex, feminists.