Ideas@TheCentre – The CIS newsletter (Sydney), 7 August 2009

Fresh shots have been fired in the never-ending battle of the sexes this week. In Britain, Deputy Prime Minister Harriet Harman is pulling the strings while her boss, Gordon Brown, holidays in Scotland. To have a woman in charge was good because ‘men cannot be left to run things on their own’, Ms Harman declared. And while she was at it she wondered whether Lehman Brothers would have survived had it been Lehman Sisters.

Which, of course, begs the question what went wrong with Fannie Mae?

These are tough times for men when they can no longer be trusted to run a country, let alone a bank. At least they still make fascinating research objects. A new survey revealed that men spend on average 43 minutes a day staring at women. Women, on the other hand, only ogle 20 minutes a day at the other sex.

This only allows one conclusion: That women use the rest of their free time watching other women.

Australian men had a particularly bad week in the media. A new study published in the Journal of Population Economics ranks them as the least attractive husbands in the world for a simple reason: the average Aussie bloke is far less likely to help out with household chores than men in other developed countries.

Perhaps it is only that Aussie men are too busy to do the dishes because of their newly discovered hobbies. Yoga and pilates are the rage among Australia’s new breed of metrosexual men. When 75 per cent of Aussie men are more likely to bring champagne and a cheese platter to a barbeque, rather than the traditional six-pack of beer and raw meat, you know that things have changed. We can only hope Australian women are not getting too confused when their boyfriends borrow their concealer.

There is only one place on earth where a man’s world is still as it should be, and that’s Russia. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has just released pictures showing him shirtless on a horseback, making fire by a lake and relaxing in a tree. As his steely blue eyes were gazing into the Siberian sky, nobody would have dared to tell the muscular ex-KGB man that men couldn’t be left to run things on their own.

But maybe that’s just the difference between Vladimir Putin and Gordon Brown.