kyle353

Better make that two, Kyle.

Fighting Kyle Sandilands and his ilk strikes me as about as futile as fighting terrorism: it's a war that cannot be won - at least using "conventional" methods.

Sure you can spend an enormous amount of money, time and newsprint furiously battling bad men with radio shows or carloads of plastic explosives, but you'll never rid the world of either.

The only way to "stop" terrorism is to monitor billions of people around the clock, which is clearly impossible, while the logical way to rid society of Sandilands and men like him is to end misogyny or make it illegal, which is also plainly impractical.

Sandilands obviously has a problem with women - but so do a lot men.

Recently, I told a panel discussion before the Law Institute of Victoria, that "misogyny is the heartbeat of humanity".

I got my wording wrong on that occasion because what I should have said was "misogyny is at the heartbeat of humanity".

Hatred of woman, their abuse and exploitation is one of the fundamental tenets of human society, for a very simple reason: traditional male roles - except in a handful of matriarchal societies - rely on the submissiveness of females.

This may not be the case in your life, but globally it's an indisputable fact. According to the UN, two-thirds of children denied primary education are girls and 75 per cent of the world's 876 million illiterate adults are women.

The oft-cited statistic is that women carry out more than two-thirds of the globe's work, yet earn roughly 10 per cent of the income and own only 1 per cent of the means of production.

Some may not call this "hatred" of women, merely the realities of poverty, but at its best, it's gross inequality informed by the belief that girls are worth less than boys. 

This is something even enlightened Aussies accept as part of the landscape if we look at pay rates for women and their under-representation in almost every one of Australia's power structures.

And, sure, we kick up a stink at the blatant examples of misogyny such as displayed by Sandilands but we don't bat an eyelid at sexualisation and degradation of our mothers, daughters and sisters because it is everywhere - it's the wallpaper.

On White Ribbon Day I heard a respected AM radio announcer condemn an ugly physical attack on a woman to which police were looking for witnesses.

Without a hint of irony, he then switched to a segment about Jimi Hendrix being voted the greatest guitarist in the world, playing a snatch of his song Hey Jo, the first lyrics to air being "Hey Joe, I heard you shot your woman down, You shot her down to the ground, yeah!"

Am I sounding like a first-year women's studies student?

Maybe, but when you open your eyes to the wallpaper that is misogyny, you see that wiping Sandilands off it in no way changes the decor.

Like terrorism, misogyny can only be banished by changing tack and attacking the fundamental causes. For terrorism, this is poverty and powerlessness and, for misogyny, it is a rethinking of our education system so that gender relations are given as much weight in the classroom, if not more, than maths and English.

Such a course, known as respectful relationships education, has started in some Victorian schools and, though I'm gladdened to see it, I doubt the "sack Sandilands" will crew suddenly join the chorus for gender classes for youngsters, because it's easier to hate.

Contempt for the other gender is one of the universal structures of humanity, an increasingly balanced battle of the sexes we're happy to ignore and encourage because it is simpler to wipe the walls of Kyle Sandilands.

However, the machinery that created him remains, more often than not, encouraged by the male-run sponsors and executives who now seem to be deserting him.

Sam de Brito's latest novel Hello Darkness is in bookstores now. You can follow him on Twitter here.