According to social demographer Bernard Salt, the rise in single-person households in Australia is due to a whopping increase in our society of “sad, lonely old baby boomers. The widowed, separated and divorced”.

Oh, fuck off, Bernard.

Bernard belongs to that curious demographic of demographers and social researchers whose lives appear to be devoted to telling other people precisely how their lives are completely fucked (even if they’ve been blissfully unaware of this until now), how they’ll be fucked forever, and how they will die a lonely, feeble and unutterably miserable death, leaving naught behind but tears on a pillow and a few sad, solitary stains on the bedsheets.

Joining Bernard yesterday was Bettina Arndt, a woman whose life appears to revolve around telling other people how to fuck.

Try this quick quiz …

Which of the following does not belong:

1. Legless.
2. Armless.
3. Headless.
4. Childless.

In one of the most staggeringly stupid articles I have ever read (and one that a friend of mine referred to as “the dumbest column of the decade” yesterday), Arndt sets about lamenting Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s status as a single woman without children in a de facto relationship as a bad example to other women and a situation that will, somewhat inevitably in Arndt’s mind, rise up to bite Julia savagely in the arse as she totters uncomfortably toward old age and lonely decrepitude.

Arndt appears to believe that, just as person without a head is not a complete human being, a woman without a child is also rather incomplete and unfulfilled. And a woman without a wedding ring and a basket of her man’s streak-marked y-fronts to scrub is a sad and tragic thing to behold.

(Bettina’s next trick will be a treatise on the evils of dancing, followed by a spirited address to the local temperance union, and then a quick dusting of her favourite bonnet and hoop skirt before popping off to a tent revival meeting for some snake handling and an incoherent gibber.)

The response to Arndt’s article online yesterday (over 500 comments) and in the SMH letters page today is telling, to say the least.

For the general consensus appears to be, “Oh, fuck off, Bettina”.

We have, most certainly, moved on. We have moved on from those days when a child born out of wedlock was regarded as “illegitimate”, a “bastard”. We have moved on from those days when a couple co-habiting were said to be “living in sin”. We have moved on from those days where unmarried women were regarded as “spinsters”, and unmarried men “confirmed bachelors”. We have moved on from those days when a woman should simply lie back, submit, and think of England.

We have. Arndt has not, and she cuts a rather sad and lonely figure herself now, a solitary and irrelevant soul wailing at us over the untidy state of our emotional lives and expecting us to gnash our teeth and beat our breasts and bemoan our tragic circumstances in return so that she may earn her supper.

It’s rubbish.

But it’s not just the likes of Arndt and Salt, it’s every fucking thing.

Every aspect of our life, the conscious choices we have made, the circumstances that have simply arisen from events, our consumption of anything and everything, what we have done, what we have not done, what we may do and how we do it is shoved under some knobhead’s microscope, and inevitably, we are found to be wanting in all things, inadequate in all ways and means, our choices deemed to be a danger to all and sundry, not least ourselves, and the message finally transmitted amounts to, “You are sadly and tragically incomplete, wrong and invalid, you are not right, and you will die horribly”.

I, for one, am heartily sick of it, for it is elephantine bullshit of the highest order, and it is the type of bullshit that appears to propel much of mainstream media these days, given that mainstream media in Australia now revolves chiefly around “opinion” pieces, hysteria, gossip and trivialities.

I know and have known, married and unmarried couples with children, married couples without, gay couples who have been committed to each other for decades, gay couples with children, single men and single women with children, and happily contented single men and women who would rather stick a fork in their eye than fart about on R.S.V.P desperate for a date.

These are all adults who have made decisions, some right, some wrong. They are adults who have made choices, some good, some bad. They have done these things for themselves, and when something has gone awry, being adults, they deal with it and move on.

They, and I, do not need some chipper-voiced cunt with a clipboard and a book advance poking their fingers in our chests and wagging them in our faces to lecture us on how we have failed to meet their lofty expectations by not living up to some mythical standard of social legitimacy.

Bettina, meet Bernard.

Now fuck off, the both of you.