It seems as if three successive waves of feminism haven’t resolved the chronic mismatch between the ideal of the ‘good’ and ‘happy’ mother and the realities of women’s lives.

Even if you consciously reject them, ideas about what a mother ought to be and ought to feel are probably there from the minute you wake up until you go to bed at night. Even in our age of increased gender equality it seems as if the culture loves nothing more than to dish out the myths about how to be a better mother (or a thinner, more fashionable, or better-looking one).

It’s not just the celebrity mums pushing their prams on magazine covers, or the continuing dearth of mothers on TV who are less than exceptionally good-looking, or that mothers in advertising remain ubiquitously obsessed with cleaning products and alpine-fresh scents. While TV dramas have pleasingly increased the handful of roles that feature working mothers, most are unduly punished in the twists of the melodramatic plot. They have wimpy husbands or damaged children, and of course TV’s bad characters are inevitably bad due to the shortcomings of their mothers (serial killers, for example, invariably have overbearing mothers or alcoholic mothers, or have never really separated from their mothers).

It seems we are living in an age of overzealous motherhood. Indeed, in a world in which the demands of the workplace have increased, so too the ideals of motherhood have become paradoxically more – not less – demanding. In recent years, commonly accepted ideas about what constitutes a barely adequate level of mothering have dramatically expanded to include extraordinary sacrifices of time, money, feelings, brains, social relationships, and indeed sleep.

In Australia, most mothers work. But recent studies show that working mothers now spend more time with their children than their non-working mothers did in 1975. Working mothers achieve this extraordinary feat by sacrificing leisure, mental health, and even personal hygiene to spend more time with their kids.

This is coupled with a new kind of anxious sermonising that is having a profound impact on mothers, especially among the middle class. In Elisabeth Badinter’s book The Conflict, she argues that an ideology of ‘Naturalism’ has given rise to an industry of experts advocating increasingly pristine forms of natural birth and natural pregnancy, as well as an ever-expanding list of increasingly time-intensive child rearing duties that are deemed to fall to the mother alone. These duties include most of the classic practices of 21st century child rearing, including such nostrums as co-sleeping, babywearing and breastfeeding-on-demand until the age of two.

It seems we are living in an age of overzealous motherhood.

Whether it is called Intensive Mothering or Natural Parenting, these new credos of motherhood are wholly taken up with the idea that there is a narrowly prescribed way of doing things. In the West, 21st century child rearing is becoming increasingly time-consuming, expert-guided, emotionally draining, and incredibly expensive. In historical terms, I would be willing to hazard a guess that never before has motherhood been so heavily scrutinised. It is no longer just a question of whether you should or should not eat strawberries or prawns or soft cheese, or, heaven forbid, junk food, while you are pregnant, but so too, the issue of what you should or should not feel has come under intense scrutiny.

Never before has there been such a microscopic investigation of a pregnant woman’s emotional state, before, during and after birth. Indeed, the construction of new psychological disorders for mothers appears to have become something of a psychological pastime, with the old list of mental disorders expanding beyond prenatal anxiety, postnatal depression, postpartum psychosis and the baby blues, to include the baby pinks (a label for a woman who is illogically and inappropriately happy to be a mother), as well as Prenatal and Postnatal Stress Disorder, Maternal Anxiety and Mood Imbalance and Tokophobia—the latter being coined at the start of this millennium as a diagnosis for an unreasonable fear of giving birth.

The problem with the way in which this pop psychology is played out in the media is that it performs an endless re-inscription of the ideologies of mothering. These ideologies are often illogical, contradictory and – one suspects – more often dictated by what is convenient for society and not what is actually good for the children and parents involved. Above all else, mothers should be ecstatically happy mothers, because sad mothers are failed mothers. Indeed, according to the prevailing wisdom, unhappy mothers are downright unnatural, if not certifiably insane.

Never before has motherhood been so heavily scrutinised.

Little wonder there has been an outcry against such miserable standards of perfection. The same decade that saw the seeming triumph of the ideologies of Intensive and Natural mothering, also saw the rise of what has been called the ‘Parenting Hate Read’ — a popular outpouring of books and blogs written by mothers (and even a few fathers) who frankly confess that they are depressed about having children for no better reason than it is often mind-numbing, exhausting and dreadful. Mothers love their children, say the ‘Parenting Hate Reads’, but they do not like what is happening to their lives.

The problem is perhaps only partly about the disparity between media images of ecstatically happy mummies and the reality of women’s lives. It is also because our ideas about happiness have grown impoverished. Happiness, as it is commonly understood in the western world, is made up of continuous moments of pleasure and the absence of pain.

These popular assumptions about happiness are of comparatively recent origin, emerging in the works of philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham, who argued in the 18th century that people act purely in their self-interest and the goal to which self-interest aspires is happiness. Ethical conduct, according to Bentham and James Mill (father to John Stuart), should therefore aspire to maximise pleasure and minimise pain.

Our ideas about happiness have grown impoverished.

This ready equation of goodness, pleasure and happiness flew in the face of ideas that had been of concern to philosophers since Aristotle argued that a person is not made happy by fleeting pleasures, but by fulfilment stemming from meaning and purpose. Or, as Nietzsche, the whirling dervish of 19th century philosophy, put it, “Man does not strive for happiness – only the Englishman does”.

Nevertheless, Western assumptions about happiness have remained broadly utilitarian, giving rise to the culturally constructed notion of happiness we see in TV commercials, showing families becoming happier with every purchase. Or by life coaches peddling the dubious hypothesis that self-belief can overcome the odds, whatever your social or economic circumstance.

Unless you are Mother Teresa, you have probably been spending your life up until the time you have children in a reasonably independent and even self-indulgent way. You work hard through the week but sleep in on the weekend. You go to parties. You come home drunk. You see your friends when you want. Babies have different ideas. They stick forks in electric sockets, go berserk in the car seat, and throw up on your work clothes. They want to be carried around in the day and wake in the night.

If society can solve its social problems then maybe parenting will cease to be a misery competition. Mothers might not be happy in a utilitarian or hedonistic sense but will lead rich and satisfying lives. Then maybe a stay-at-home dad can change a nappy without a choir of angels descending from heaven singing ‘Hallelujah’.

This is an edited extract from “On Happiness: New Ideas for The 21st Century” UWA Publishing.

“What do we say to the god of death?” swordsman Syrio Forel asks Arya Stark in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones (and in HBO’s TV series). “Not today.”

This short refrain marks the beginning of a sustained exploration of humanity’s relationship with death told through Arya’s experiences. She becomes a murderer and later, in ‘The House of the Undying’ where death is seen as a god to be worshipped, an assassin and servant to that god.

Watching Arya’s story unfold, it seemed to me she’d never forgotten her former (you guessed it, now dead) teacher’s lesson – the only response to death is denial.

According to many thinkers, this isn’t surprising at all. Arya isn’t alone in running from death. Denying the reality of human mortality is a near universal behaviour. In The Antidote: Happiness for people who can’t stand positive thinking, Oliver Burkeman considers the writing of Ernest Becker, whose arguments Burkeman surmises. “Your life is one relentless attempt to avoid [thinking about death] – a struggle so elemental that … for much of the time you succeed.”

Becker believed to avoid confronting our mortality people invest in “immortality projects”. Art, family, business, nations, war, charity, and so on… Immortality projects aim to overcome physical death by ensuring our continued existence through symbols or ideas.

The late David Bowie promised “We can be heroes”, and that’s precisely Becker’s point. Immortality projects are attempts to become heroes, thereby avoiding the emptiness of death.

But research suggests the common instinct to avoid thinking about our mortality might be worth pushing against. In a paper entitled ‘Deliver us from Evil’, researchers found that mortality avoidance can cloud our judgements about life and death issues, leading to unreflective decisions in high-stakes situations.

The study asked two groups of people to undertake a long and generally dull questionnaire and then to read a short essay and tell researchers how strongly they agreed with it. The essay was a strong statement of support for the controversial policies of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. It included lines like “It annoys me when I hear other people complain that President Bush is using his war against terrorism as a cover for instituting policies that, in the long run, will be detrimental to this country … Mr. Bush has been a source of strength and inspiration to us all. God bless him and God bless America”.

The only difference between the two groups was that one questionnaire forced subjects to consider their own mortality. The “mortality salience” group were asked to “briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you” and to “jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die, and once you are physically dead”.

For some, even the idea of answering these questions might feel uncomfortable, as it did for the subjects in the experiment. Researchers found the “mortality salient” subjects invested more strongly in the nearest immortality project to hand – the war in Iraq. Subjects from the mortality salience group agreed strongly with the essay. By contrast, the control group generally disagreed with the essay’s sentiments.

When we’re forced to confront our own mortality, our default reaction may not be the product of rational thinking but an impulsive rejection of death.

This tells us something important – especially in a time when we are continually confronted with the threat and reality of terrorism and domestic violence nearly every day. When we’re forced to confront our own mortality our default reaction may not be the product of rational thinking but an impulsive rejection of death. The researchers argued similarly:

The fact that reminders of death and the events of 9/11 enhanced support for President Bush in the present studies may not bode well for the philosophical democratic ideal that political preferences are the result of rational choice based on an informed understanding of the relevant issues.

This poses a challenge for ethical behaviour – some of the most serious ethical decisions people face are made when they are confronted with death. Most obviously these include healthcare and political decisions with serious implications for the general populous. Is it possible to overcome mortality avoidance and make decisions based on moral values and principles instead?

Researchers weren’t optimistic on this point, but Burkeman indirectly suggests a way forward. His interest lay in whether thinking about death might enable us to live a happier life. He presents evidence that regular contemplation of death can enable us to avoid horror and shock when it ultimately arrives. “The more you become aware of life’s finitude, the more you will cherish it and the less likely you will be to fritter it away on distraction”.

The same might be true for our mortality avoidance in decision making. If regular acquaintance with death can remove some of its shocking strangeness, perhaps we will be less likely to invest in immortality projects as a way to distract ourselves from its reality. By making our peace with the fact we are all going to die, we will be less likely to make decisions based in our fear of death. If ‘Deliver us from Evil’ is any indication, this might also save lives in the long run by ensuring serious decisions are made reasonably and not from fear.

Plus, doing so might also make you happier.

I’ve been doing work with and for trans women for about 15 years now. And the thing I tell most audiences at the outset is this – once you know one trans person, you know one trans person. That is all you know.

Germaine Greer has met a few trans women and she has made a decision about all trans women. She has decided that trans women are not women.

I am going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she is not making such a sweeping statement based on personal and anecdotal evidence. This leaves only biology and theory as ways to determine what defines a woman.

Let’s start with biology.

I believe trans women are not just women, they are female. This is a hang-up on the part of many feminists who are still stuck in some world where biology is destiny. Because if ‘woman’, as de Beauvoir argued, is a social construct, we become women by living as women in the world, by facing oppression based on gender. For some women, that social conditioning starts with birth because of a vagina and a doctor’s declaration. For others, it starts at 15, 45, 75…

There is nothing feminist about asserting the rights of the oppressors over the dignity and value of the oppressed.

Trans women are aware they are female and are meant to have bodies that allow others to gender them correctly. Harry Benjamin, a pioneer in trans issues, saw attempts to change the minds of transgendered people as not only futile but un-Hippocratic. Changing minds caused unnecessarily suffering. So he designed a way to change bodies.

Definitions of sex are based on very little – chromosomes and hormone dominance. The combination of those two is what creates a sexed body, but we also know that bodies with vaginas sometimes come with XY chromosomes and vice versa.

We also really have no idea what part of the brain “tells” us our sex. Mostly, for those of us who are not trans, we never face a disruption between our bodies/glands/hormones and the way we are socialized. Trans people do. Some experience a crippling, brutal disruption. They experience gendered oppression both internally and externally.

Which is all my way of saying ‘female’, like ‘woman’, is an unstable category. Its very definition is changes based on what we know about bodies, chromosomes, hormones, foetal development, and particularly brain sex.

So we turn to theory for a definition of woman instead.

As a feminist my compassion is with those who experience gendered oppression of any kind. My intersectional feminism recognises all women experience gendered oppression in different ways. For black women, gendered oppression is racialized. For poor women, gendered oppression is classed. For trans women, gendered oppression is transphobic.

I don’t know how Germaine Greer missed out on 30+ years of gender theory, positing that woman is a stable, universal and identifiable category. It hasn’t been for a very long time. I also don’t know how she can be any kind of post-structural feminist and not acknowledge that socialization is what makes a woman a woman.

I don’t know of a group of women right now who are more restricted or oppressed by someone else’s definition of ‘woman’ than trans women.

And I don’t know of a group of women right now who are more restricted or oppressed by someone else’s definition of ‘woman’ than trans women (except, of course, black women and lesbians and childfree women and post-menopausal women). ‘Woman’ is, after all, a category of patriarchy’s making.

It pains me to see a feminist borrow tools from the master’s toolbox and call them liberation.

Germaine Greer is wrong. She carries a greater resonance and burden because we expect such remarkable feminism and knowledge from her. She is not dismissible or stupid, but she is still wrong. Everything I know as a feminist is built on inclusion. ‘Woman’ is an alliance, not an identity you choose. It is the sum of all of the parts of what it is to live in a patriarchy and to feel no power and a tremendous threat of violence if you don’t follow the rules.

If there is anyone in the world who is experiencing those things right now, it is trans women. She is not just upsetting people by saying what she says. She is giving those who hate trans women permission to make their lives more miserable. And there is nothing feminist about asserting the rights of the oppressors over the dignity and value of the oppressed.

Her stance is not just harmful and illogical but more than anything else it seems spiteful, exclusive, and lacking in compassion. It is not my feminism, and no feminist worth her salt would exclude other women based on how good or how bad they are at being women. And she is doing exactly that.

Read a different take on trans women and Germaine Greer here, by Aoife Assumpta Hart.

Despite its usefulness when you lock your keys in the house, or forget about a crucial meeting or trip on your child’s toy, people object to swearing. The justifications are usually moral, or quasi-moral. We’re often told swearing is disrespectful, impolite, aggressive, intimidating or insulting.

It is also common to hear a pragmatic objection to swearing. We risk wearing out swear words by saying them too often. If overused, swear words will lose their power to shock. Too much swearing will result in a bland, emotionally inert vocabulary.

Is this true? Is it already happening?

This pragmatic worry is well founded. Philosopher Joel Feinberg remarked that swear words “acquire their strong expressive power in virtue of an almost paradoxical tension between powerful taboo and universal readiness to disobey”. We need the taboo to make swear words powerful in the first place. And we need to break the taboo in order to make use of their power.

If we are too eager to disobey a taboo then we risk losing the taboo. This frequently happens in other areas of life, often for the better. Public displays of homosexuality were shocking 20 years ago but – at least in the UK and many other countries – not now, largely thanks to an increasing visibility and openness about sexuality.

This might be happening with swearing too. There are more opportunities to encounter swearing, due to increasingly liberal attitudes and the proliferation of uncensored discussion on the internet. A report by the BBC and the ASA (the Advertising Standards Authority) found that “fuck” – once close to the pinnacle of offensiveness – is less shocking than it used to be.

We probably have a few years to go before the Queen uses her Christmas Day speech to report that she has had a “fucking shit year”.

But this underestimates the complexity of how we shock people by swearing. While “fuck” is pretty ubiquitous in some situations, there remains a strong taboo against using it in other contexts. We probably have a few years to go before the Queen uses her Christmas Day speech to report that she has had a “fucking shit year” rather than an annus horribilis. It will be a while before your doctor breaks news of your terminal illness by saying, in a most sympathetic voice, “You are totally fucked”.

And even in contexts where we can swear more freely, much depends on how we swear. Your Facebook friends may not bat an eyelid at your Saturday night status update, “Fucking wasted again”.

You might, however, put a few noses out of joint if you respond to their cheerful birthday wishes with a “Fuck you!” Using swear words to shock is not purely a matter of the availability of shocking words.

In any case, even if “fuck” really were to lose its shock value we still have plenty else to choose from. Many people who don’t mind “fuck” still draw the line at “cunt”. If you really want to get someone’s attention in these enlightened times, you could utter a racist or homophobic slur. The offensiveness of this sort of language has increased at the same time as the offensiveness of “fuck” has decreased.

There are persuasive moral reasons why you shouldn’t use prejudicial language, but the issue here is not the ethics of offensive language, but whether we have any powerful swear words left. The availability of shocking words tracks what people find offensive. As long as we remain offended by something or other, we will have the capacity to offend people by referring to it. And if offensive ways to refer to it don’t exist, we can invent them.

If you’re looking for a way to shock and offend, to express anger or to help you cope with the pain of stepping barefoot on a piece of Lego, you don’t need to resort to hate speech. You don’t need to swear either. Just break a few taboos.

Go on Facebook and tell your best friend his new baby is ugly. Tell your boss she’s put on weight. Loudly summarise your preferred masturbation techniques for the benefit of everyone in your train carriage.

Hell, you don’t even need to use language. Give your colleagues the middle finger. Turn up to work naked. Take a dump in the aisle during a church service. Write an online essay replete with swear words and disconcerting examples.

With a little imagination we can find limitless and powerful ways to offend people if that’s what we want to do. We don’t need to give a fuck about whether our favourite swear words are declining in their capacity to shock.

This article was originally published on The Age.

The decision by Cranbourne Carlisle Primary School in 2015 to allow some of its students a temporary exemption from singing Australia’s national anthem has sparked outrage in some quarters.

Those exempted all belonged to the Shiite faith, a branch of Islam. But I expect these students usually sang the anthem with as much pride as any other Australian child.

However, on this occasion, the opportunity to sing fell during the month of Muharram – a period of mourning during which Shiites remember and honour their founder, Imam Hussein. This is a month of solemnity in which Shiites are to avoid all joyful acts, including singing. It captures some of the tone of the Christian period of Lent which was traditionally a time devoted to pious reflection and avoiding overtly pleasurable activities.

So what might be said about a school’s decision to let children put religious observance ahead of patriotic duty?

There would have been barely a ripple of dissent if the issue had been one of physical capacity.

The first thing to note is there would have been barely a ripple of dissent if the issue had been one of physical capacity. Imagine a young girl who has recently returned to school after throat surgery. She feels fine. Her voice has returned to normal and all discomfort has gone.

However, her doctor has warned she is not to shout or sing for the next month to protect against scarring. She must also avoid dust and smoke, and stay indoors where possible.

Her first day back coincides with the school assembly. By tradition, the school meets under the spreading oaks that are the its finest feature. The classes are formed up around a central pole where the Australian flag is raised each morning as the national anthem is sung by all.

The student wants to join her classmates at assembly and participate equally in the proceedings. Like every child her age, she does not want to stand out from the crowd. But her mother has explained the situation to the school principal, so instead of singing the national anthem with gusto, she finds herself sitting inside her classroom waiting for the others.

Now, would this student, her parents or the school authorities be blamed for not singing the national anthem or for not being at assembly? I think not.

Yet the analogy between this hypothetical and the Carlisle case is good in all respects but one. The risk faced by students at Carlisle was of a spiritual rather than physical order.

The idea of spiritual risk or disorder has become unfamiliar in an increasingly secular society. For many people, it is perplexing that someone might genuinely fear ‘sinful conduct’ or that such a concern takes precedence over civic duty.

Yet not so long ago a majority of Australians believed in hell and the possibility of ‘eternal perdition’. Indeed there are still people who would choose to be imprisoned or die rather than act against their religious beliefs or conscience.

The fact that the spiritual worldview is so unfamiliar to us does not make it any less real or powerful for those who are pious and concerned for the health of their souls.

One might doubt the validity of the metaphysics but not the sincerity of the believers.

The Shiite children of Cranbourne Carlisle Primary School were neither rejecting nor disrespecting Australia when they temporarily withdrew from their assembly. They were protecting their spiritual integrity. They were also accepting the advantages of living in a liberal democratic society that guarantees their right to the peaceful enjoyment of religious freedom.

The children who remained in assembly were singing the national anthem in support of this ideal. For all Australians are young and free.