Bit of a Bettina Arndt
One Sunday night in the early '80s, Bettina caught a taxi into the city. The cab driver was a chatty bloke and asked her where she was going. She explained she was off to give an after-dinner speech.
"Oh, really," he replied. "What do you talk about?" She explained that she was a sex therapist and was planning to tell them about some of the adventures she had experienced in her line of work.
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Bettina on ABC's Life Matters radio programme
"I suppose you're a bit of a Bettina Arndt," he responded.
Not just a bit, but the real thing. It came as a great surprise to Bettina that after ten years working in the media talking about sex, she'd become generic, a brand of her own - rather like soap powder.
It had been an amazing decade. The highlights of her career in sex included not just having her own talk-back radio show and being banned for two years from live television and radio but becoming the person that everyone came to for advice about sex. Like the nurse who called from a spinal unit in a major Sydney hospital asking what to do about the ward full of young men who kept asking her if they would ever get an erection again. And the mother of the intellectually impaired boy who'd been caught masturbating at his school. As a twenty three year old, such issues were daunting but Bettina quickly learnt that people came to her because they had nowhere else to go. She travelled regularly overseas to meet sex researchers in the US and Europe who were just beginning to find answers to some of these puzzles. She taught medical students, doctors and other professionals and talked endlessly about this fascinating subject to audiences all over Australia and overseas.
By the 1980s she'd had enough of a good thing. She gave up sex - professionally speaking - and moved onto writing and talking about broader social issues, particularly the changing relationships between men and women. In the mid 80's Bettina spent five years in New York writing a syndicated newspaper column and adding two children to her family of three.
Bettina returned to Australia in late 1991 and worked as a feature writer for many Australian newspapers and magazines. As a respected social commentator she was invited onto government advisory committees covering issues from family law to childcare and ageing.
But after nearly twenty years writing and talking about social issues, she is now having a great time, once again studying what happens in the bedroom. Her new book, The Sex Diaries, was published by MUP in March, 2009. Now she is following up the success of her diary-based research with a brand new project. She's now seeking volunteers for the Male Sex Diaries.
Yes, this one is all about men but she also needs their partners to be part of the action.