Bettina Mary Arndt (born 1 August 1949) is an Australian writer and commentator who specialises in sex and gender issues. Starting as a sex therapist, she established her career in the 1970s publishing and broadcasting as well as writing several books. In the 2000s she abandoned feminism, and has since attracted controversy with her views on sexual abuse and domestic violence, and men's rights advocacy.
Early life and education Bettina Mary Arndthttps://www.jwire.com.au/2020-australia-day-awards/Report of the Council. (1981). Australia: U.S. Government Printing Office. p.78 was born in Penrith, England, on 1 August 1949,https://www.bettinaarndt.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/CV-February-2020.pdf the daughter of economist Heinz Arndt and Ruth (née Strohsahl), the youngest of three children. Her parents were German, and escaped Nazi Germany prior to World War II. They emigrated to Australia in 1945 and she grew up in Canberra.
In 1971, Arndt completed a Bachelor of Science degree at the Australian National University. She completed a Master of Clinical Psychology degree at the University of New South Wales in Sydney in 1973; her thesis was on orgasm dysfunction. She is not a registered clinical psychologist and has never been registered as a health practitioner.
Career Sex therapist and educator After graduation, Arndt practised as one of Australia's first sex therapists in the early 1970s. In the early 1970s she was operating at a clinic in Sydney as a sexologist working mostly with women.
Arndt came to prominence in the 1970s by editing Forum, an Australian adult sex education magazine, which led to frequent radio and television appearances. She was appointed editor in 1974 and remained in the position until July 1982. This period of her career was the subject of a television documentary in the Australian Time of My Life series (2013), in which the presenter introduced Arndt as "the feisty young editor [who] taught us all we need to know, and more, about ... sex".
The Forum publication proved controversial in conservative circles, and in Queensland Parliament in 1977 MP Des Frawley said: "It is a dirty, filthy magazine." Queensland police also raided a newsagent, seizing copies of the magazine and requesting the proprietor to show cause.
Medical witnesses, including gynaecology professor Derek Llewellyn-Jones, presented evidence to a court hearing supporting Forum’s educative role in the court hearing on the matter, summed up by Magistrate Mr N. O. Scott to make the case that "the general public was ignorant or misinformed on sexual matters and there was a necessity for an education programme in this sphere. "The Anglican Dean of Brisbane, Dean George, described Forum as "a very useful educational aid to inform the public, to correct misapprehensions and therefore relieve anxieties."
Between 1973 and 1976 the Australian Broadcasting Control Board had ruled that all TV and radio programs in which Arndt took part in had to be pre-recorded so that they could be approved by station management before being transmitted. The Board explained that the ban was "imposed because most of her programs were during family viewing time... and parents wanted to have some control over the sexual information for their children."
In 1978, Arndt said that "The sexual revolution has been a damp squib", expressing some doubts about how much people were really more sophisticated in their attitudes toward sex. She acknowledged that the Women's Movement had made physiological discoveries about the sexuality of women, that there was more tolerance of a person's sexual preference, and there had been a recognition of the importance of sex for senior citizens and those with disabilities. Arndt also praised the introduction of South Australian laws criminalising rape within marriage.
Her work in sex education also involved postgraduate courses, seminars and lectures for groups including doctors and other professionals. Following the death of her husband and business partner, Dennis Minogue, in 1981, Forum magazine closed. In the mid 1980s, Arndt wrote for Australian Playboy and also wrote about broader social issues for newspapers including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. During this period Arndt also had her own radio program on 2GB and regular radio segments in major cities all over Australia. In 1982 she appeared on the TV panel-show series Beauty and the Beast and, from 1981 to 1986, was a weekly guest on television program The Today Show.
In 1983, The Sydney Morning Herald described Arndt as "the person most strongly identified with Australia's sexual revolution".
In 1984, Arndt ran a mail-order lingerie and sex toy business and authored a number of books on sex advice, including The Bettina Arndt Guide to Lovemaking for Women, in which she wrote that "Looking at what's happening to men and women in bed today, it wouldn't surprise me at all if more and more males chose to stick to their beer. Sex is fast becoming a battlefield, with women calling more of the shots."
In 1986, Arndt moved to New York City for five years and, while living in the United States, wrote a weekly newspaper column syndicated through The Age in Melbourne (and published in Canberra, Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane). She had two books published featuring collections of her writings, Private Lives (1985) and All About Us (1989). In 1991, Arndt returned with her family to live in Australia.
Commentator and men's rights activist
From the 1990s onward Arndt wrote a personal advice column for Cleo, wrote for The Bulletin, The Australian and The Australian Women's Weekly. She was a guest reporter on Four Corners on ABC TV and a regular guest on ABC radio in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Adelaide. She was on the board of the Australian National University and was the president of the board of the Royal Women's Hospital Foundation in 1999. She also served as an online dating coach from 2001 to 2017, and more recently has assisted men in writing their dating profiles and referring them on to good photographers for their dating profile photos.
During the first half of her career Arndt was a self-proclaimed feminist, but since the mid 1990s has turned to men's rights advocacy. Her later work encapsulated socially conservative ideas about relationships, family structures and children out of wedlock. In 2010, Arndt said "I spent my early career lobbying for women but turned to men when I realised how lousy they are about advocating for issues that affect their private lives." Kate Gleeson, a senior lecturer at Macquarie Law School who has studied her, says "Arndt's extolling of men's rights, as well as her critique of feminist analyses of domestic violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment and sex within marriage, has provoked feminist ire in the press", adding that "To Arndt's frustration, the male revolution she advocated of political reaction against feminism had failed to emerge."
In 1993, Arndt presented a Four Corners episode on ABC TV about alleged confusion over sexual consent titled "Yes, No, Maybe". She was criticised for downplaying rape by a group of Sydney sexual assault counsellors, who said of women who "have been raped, that in most instances they do not get a chance to say 'no'".
During the conservative Howard Government (1996–2007), Arndt was an adviser on issues such as assisted reproduction, education and child support. She served on a number of committees advising the Australian Government on policy matters, including the National Advisory Committee on Ageing (2003), the Assisted Reproductive Technologies Review Team (2005) and the Child Support Review Reference Group (2004). In 2003 the government awarded her the Centenary Medal, which recognises "people who made a contribution to Australian society or government". Gleeson observed that at this time Arndt had a "persistent criticism of matters of family law". A government committee she was part of from 2000 to 2001, the Family Law Pathways Advisory Group, was instrumental in later redrafting Australian family law.
In 2007, the Australian television program Media Watch demonstrated that a newspaper article written by Arndt for the Brisbane Courier Mail plagiarised large tracts of a Guardian article by Dick Taverne published three years earlier. The program also accused Arndt of journalistic non-disclosure in a column she wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald when she identified Kerryn Phelps's same-sex marriage to Ascham Girls' School teacher Jackie Stricker. Arndt failed to disclose that her daughter attended the school and Phelps holds Arndt partly responsible for ending her wife's career there. In her defence Arndt said that "I've never been anti-gay", saying she was merely reporting the anxieties of some Ascham parents.
Arndt wrote The Sex Diaries, based on the diaries of 98 couples talking about how they negotiate sex and deal with mismatched desire. It was published in 2009, followed by What Men Want, another diary project published in September 2010.
In 2010, Good Weekend said she had repositioned herself as "a champion of the downtrodden male of the species", adding that "In her writing, the former libertine started to sound like a self-appointed guardian of public morals." Her friend Merri Southwood said of Arndt's newspaper columns at the time, "I'm not sure how much of it is the author seeking an audience and how much is the genuine Bettina ... Because, in fact, the way she writes is sometimes a little at odds with her own personal life." Along with Australian rightwing commentators, Arndt celebrated the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential elections. During this period she was also writing for The Spectator Australia.
After previously hosting her video social commentaries on YouTube, in 2019 Arndt began moving her online presence to Thinkspot an online free speech platform attracting members of the intellectual dark web (IDW). Her motivation for this was that YouTube had removed some of her videos saying that they had contravened regulations, but Arndt stated: "YouTube have been systematically censoring my videos ... because I am challenging the feminist narrative."
In 2020, Media Watch reported that "Arndt has been in the media for more than 40 years and has written for many of Australia's leading papers and magazines as sex therapist, social commentator and, most recently, outspoken men's rights advocate." But her comments on the murder of Hannah Clarke incident in 2020 had since led to near universal condemnation in the media, including those she had previously worked with. Media Watch questioned whether or not they would use her again in the future. When questioned about Arndt's time advising the Howard Government (1996–2007), Victorian Liberal shadow minister Tim Smith said: "I think Bettina Arndt has become more extreme as the years have gone by. I don't think she was nearly this extreme during the Howard Government years. I think some of her commentary of recent years has gone beyond mainstream Australia to the fringes." News Corp's David Penberthy lamented the loss of the Arndt of the 1970s and 1980s when she was a sex therapist and a "fun person ... trying to make couples happier through sex", saying she seems to have now "herded all of the really angry guys in Australia into the one corner and has, sort of, created almost a business model out of it".