The Bachelor Australia 2017 couple Laura Byrne and Matthew ‘Matty J’ Johnson have locked horns with renowned feminist author Clementine Ford after Matty J shared a “sexist” video on social media.
On September 20, Matty, 36, posted a “comedy” skit on Instagram showing his mother doing all of the housework whilst his wife was away.
“When your partner’s away for work and you have to single parent,” he captioned the clip.
This caught the attention of Clementine, 42, who later took to Instagram to slam Matty for perpetuating “retro-sexist” stereotypes.
“I have a whole chapter about this kind of retro sexist comedy in I Don’t,” she wrote, referring to her book which centres around why modern women shouldn’t get married.
“[The chapter] explores how men use ‘comedy’ like this to hide their incompetency in plain sight,” the feminist writer explained.
“When women complain about it or push back, we’re accused, yet again, of having no sense of humour and – hilariously – of ‘hating men’.
“I’m embarrassed for everyone involved in this,” she finished.
The Bachelor’s Laura Byrne SLAMS writer Clementine Ford for calling out Matty J
Laura, 37, later hit back at Clementine’s stance against Matty’s video.
“Matt uses satire to reflect what’s happening in the world,” the Life Uncut host said.
“The irony in that video is the fact that we were both raised by single mums.
“The reason I need to justify this is because outrage culture is so great. It achieves many things, but that anger needs to be channelled to where it’s useful.
“Matt is the primary caregiver in our household. Matt does more than 70% of the parenting because I do more than 70% of the work,” she added, explaining that “it’s a very non-traditional skew in terms of labour.”
“Those things are very important parts of the story to keep perspective on when you’re going to get angry about something on the internet,” she continued.
Laura finished her video telling netizens to channel their anger towards “people who are the problem”, rather than people who “highlight” the problem.
Clementine Ford hits back at Matty J and Laura
However, things didn’t end there, with Clementine taking to her Story to respond to Laura’s video, calling the couple “precious f*cking peccadillos”.
“The defence of these people goes so deep that even the most basic of criticisms against content they chose to create is somehow you having an unfair crack at them,” she argued.
“It articulates the way these people still operate in a high school mentality. ‘We’re the cool popular kids at school so you can’t say anything mean about us, even though we’re being total dicks,'” she said mockingly.
On September 22, Matty J doubled down on his original skit, uploading a mock apology video to Instagram, which his mother interrupted by performing household duties in the background.
“Ask mum to wash my car while she’s there,” Laura joked in the comments.
Clementine responded to this clip on September 29, asking her followers: “Don’t you think it’s weird that everyone prior to me who had a problem with [the original skit] was either ignored or summarily dismissed in a mock ‘apology’ video made by Matty J?”
“If you’re [defending] people like this, it helps to be aware that they don’t actually care what their audience thinks because they don’t think you have any important kind of influence,” she added. Well said!
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