TONY JONES: Good evening. Welcome to Q&A live from the Sydney Opera House. Joining our exciting Festival of Ideas panel tonight: the joint destroying Australian Feminist Jane Caro; American novelist Alissa Nutting, whose dangerous idea is that women can be sexual predators too; Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho, whose courageous investigation of sex trafficking put her own life at risk; activist and writer Kajsa Ekis Ekman, who argues that surrogacy is the little sister of prostitution; and Kay Hymowitz, in Australia as a guest of the Centre for Independent Studies, who believes that children do best with married parents and that young men are stuck in adolescence. Please welcome our panel.

Q&A is simulcast on ABC News 24 and NewsRadio. You can join the Twitter conversation by using the #qanda hashtag on your screen. Please add @qanda if you've got a live question for us. And we've asked our Q&A Facebook followers what they'd like us to talk about tonight. They've nominated sexual slavery, surrogacy and young men as 'kiddults'. We'll start tonight with a question from Akbar Motani.

AUSTRALIA, US, ISIS

AKBAR MOTANI: Hi, my name is Akbar. My question is related regarding the current issues. Being a Muslim, I do not support what's happening in Iraq. The barbarism by ISIS is nowhere near Islamic values but being an Australian I also do not support the way the Australian Government has jumped onto the bandwagon with the US to fight against ISIS. My question is why is it Australia has jumped onto the US bandwagon without analysing the repercussions or the after-effects that would happen to Australian society?

TONY JONES: Jane Caro?

JANE CARO: Well, it feels like we've done this so many times, doesn't it, that whenever America says jump Australia seems to say how high and the funny thing is I don't know that we've actually been invited by the Iraqis themselves. I think the Iraqi ambassador is not very keen on us going and getting involved and is very worried about where our aid and where, possibly, our munitions and weapons may end up and in whose hands. It feels like a really chaotic situation to me but, at the same time, I can't help but be utterly terrified about what's happening to those people who are caught up in this collapse, it seems to me, of the rule of law and of any kind of security or safety and I can't help but be particularly terrified for the women and girls, many of whom are just disappearing. We don't even know what's happening to them. And so I'm completely torn because I don't want to just leave them to sort of be destroyed and have horrible things happen to them and yet, at the same time, it feels a little bit too quick, a little bit too unconsidered and we've done this before. It feels like we're still fighting the war that George Bush Senior started in the '90s and we've never quite come to a resolution of that. But I'm glad it's not me that has to solve the problem or come up with the answers, to be honest with you.

TONY JONES: Lydia, are you torn as well?

LYDIA CACHO: Well, not really because I think we are making the wrong questions. I know that they will go there, this is - I mean we already know the answer, but we have to try to understand why our tax dollars are going all the time to the war industry, to the armament industry who is making all the money with this and why our taxes are going there instead of saving our lives of our children and our society in every country and I, well, if you feel torn in with the Americans getting involved and pushing and asking Australians to jump, can you imagine what it feels like being in Mexico, next door to Washington. So I don't know, I think it's just - they're just pushing the entire world into the worst war ever and we shouldn't do it.

TONY JONES: What if those weapons are genuinely used to save lives because we know that a number of towns are under siege, the Kurdish Peshmerga forces who are getting the arms, supposedly, are the ones who are doing a lot of the fighting there. Is it a bad idea to arm them?

LYDIA CACHO: Well, I'll tell you a very quick story about the war against drugs implemented also by the Bush Administration and now forcibly imposed by the Obama Administration into Mexico and, apparently, signing this document saying that they made a plan saying that they would send all these guns and help the Mexican Government to implement a war against drugs, it would improve Mexicans' lives. So what happened really is the Americans bought all these guns that they sold to our government, then 6 years after we have 70,000 people assassinated, no rule of law and most of these guns we have tracked down are in the hands of organised crime. So they are making a lot of money and we cannot fool ourselves that who is bringing the guns to the terrorists and who, in the beginning, trained the terrorists to become so. So it's a big game and we cannot turn a blind eye to that.

TONY JONES: Alissa, what do you think? And bear in mind I think Australia's being accused of jumping on the American bandwagon. Of course, President Obama says he doesn't have a plan.

ALISSA NUTTING: I think we need worldwide, but also in the US, more female politicians. I think we need to give women more social power. We've never had a female president in the US and all of these war policies have been made by men.

TONY JONES: Let's hear from Kay.

KAY HYMOWITZ: Well, I think that the President is reflecting the mood of the American people and being a little reluctant actually to get involved here. But we are facing, not just in Iraq but all over the world now, a very different set of ideals and thoughts about how to live that I think that the West, and not just the United States but Europe and all throughout the developed world, is very unprepared to deal with and I'm not sure what the answer is myself. But we have very tolerant - ideals of tolerance, right, and freedom and of a certain kind of good life. We're now confronting people who maybe have a lust for violence, have much less of a sense of equality, obviously, and much more will to power and it's not just - as I said, it's not just in Iraq. We're seeing it possibly in Russia as well. And I'm wondering what happens when our approach, which is, as we hear here, so very, very reluctant and understandably so, what happens when that confronts a much more violent and much more power seeking set of problems.

TONY JONES: In the meantime, what do you do when there are large numbers of people under siege, whose lives are being threatened by a murderous group who we have seen decapitating people in the street?

KAY HYMOWITZ: Right. Well, we know from recent experience that sometimes these things backfire when we do try to get involved, so it's a very difficult question. On the other hand, to do nothing, as Jane says, is equally disturbing.

TONY JONES: Kajsa.

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Yeah, good question, Mr Motani. I mean, I would agree with you totally. You know, I think that ISIS basically is a fascist movement. It has nothing to do with the values of Islam as I know it, thought I'm not a Muslim myself but I think you have to look at the background to why this whole thing came up. If you look at Syria, I think it's the backlash of the Arabic Spring, you know. If you know a philosopher called Walter Benjamin, he once said that fascism, when it succeeds, there's always a failed revolution behind that. So whenever a revolution fails you have fascists coming up and I think on the Syrian side, you know, that would be part of the explanation. If you look at the Iraqi side, you know, that would never have happened if it wasn't for the US in the first place. You know, I mean, they tore down the country. They destroyed everything, whole infrastructure, social, political infrastructure. That's why this is coming out now. But about female politicians, hard to say but Hillary Clinton isn't much better, you know, when it comes to war. She's one of the most war-prone politicians. So I don't think there's going to be much of a change there.

TONY JONES: I'm going to just pause you there, Kajsa, because we've got a question that actually picks up on that point that you've just raised. It comes from Ekaterina Todarello.

WOMEN AND WAR

EKATERINA TODARELLO: Good evening. They say that if mothers were ruling the world there would be no wars. Yet we know female leaders, mothers like, say, Margaret Thatcher, took their nations to war. Does the nature of a woman change with power?

TONY JONES: So I will come back to you, Kajsa, since you were talking about this already.

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Yeah.

TONY JONES: Does the nature of women change with power when they gain power?

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: I think definitely if there's only one of them, you know, because if there's only one woman, you know, at the top of a government which consists of men, you know, she's basically having to adapt to their way of being. If you look at Europe, you know, I wrote my last book on the Euro crisis and Angela Merkel is basically, you know, the one that's now taking over and, you know, subjecting all other European countries to harsh economic politics. So I think somebody said that, you know, there is a magic limit of 30%. So once, you know, you get a minority group - and women aren't actually a minority. You know, were actually a majority in a lot of countries - over 30% in power that's when they start to bring their culture with them into power but before that, you know, they're mainly adapting. But then again, you know, I don't believe in inherent differences between men and women either, so I'm not sure about that, you know, that the world would be different.

TONY JONES: Kay.

KAY HYMOWITZ: Well, I do believe actually in inherent differences but I also think that it's very difficult to imagine a world where women are all good and men are all bad and that will solve the problem or if we just get more women. I don't know. I went to junior high school and that's not what I remember. So I'm very reluctant to agree with that and I also think it kind of leads us down a path that's not very useful. It's utopian. There's - the men are not going away. I mean this is the world we live in. Let's deal with it.

TONY JONES: Does the nature of women change if they get power? There's a sense to which that question is pointing at leaders from the past but possibly leaders from the future in the future.

KAY HYMOWITZ: Right. Well, think of women and men as kind of on a bell curve and you have women who are very, very - are more bellicose than many men are. So, I don't know, does the nature of a woman change? No, I think women who go into that - into politics at that high-level are going to tend to be different kind of women.

TONY JONES: Jane.

JANE CARO: I don't really like the idea that we put a pressure on women that if they get into power they suddenly have to be way better than the men and they have to cure all the world's problems and they have to be perfect and wonderful like mothers to the entire world, nurturing us all and, you know, saints, because I think that this is just absurd and it's an added pressure and I think we saw a little bit of that with Julia Gillard's prime ministership. Ridiculous expectations. We also saw it with Obama, the expectations placed on this man that he would somehow, because he was different, be you know, a miracle worker. It's a terrible pressure. Look, we will only have true equality when there are as many mediocre women in positions of power as there are mediocre men. So let's get on.

TONY JONES: Alissa.

ALISSA NUTTING: Well I mean right now, you know, we are in a patriarchy, your Honour, so, I mean, when women like Hillary rise to positions of power, I mean, I think that they just are inherently having to serve that, you know. I don't think that, you know, are all women good? Can women not be evil? Of course, women can be evil and of course women can rise into positions of power by saying, you know, really evil things and really being evil people. You know, but, I mean, to change a dynamic to get - you know, I don't know what a American Government, you know, with, sort of, this, you know, more equal gender make up would even look like because we are so far away from that. So, I mean, I don't even think we can talk about that yet when we've never ever ever had a single female president.

TONY JONES: Lydia.

LYDIA CACHO: Well, I agree to what's been said specifically on this side of the table. But I think that we are not inherently better than men but we are certainly educated in a different way and education means everything. Because if you are educated in the context of gender equality, what has been proved over and over again is if you want to enter power, you have to follow the patriarchal rules in order to get to a certain point and if you question patriarchal rules then you get put in jail, you get raped, you get persecuted and, well, I know some of those things so...

TONY JONES: I mean can I just interrupt you there?

LYDIA CACHO: Yeah, sure.

TONY JONES: Because I know you do and when I read your story I was quite shocked to find that some of the worst abuses were committed against you or ordered to be committed against you by powerful women.

LYDIA CACHO: Yeah, of course, by politicians.

TONY JONES: By women.

LYDIA CACHO: By politicians no. The ones that ordered that were the politicians, the Governor of Puebla, the Governor of Quintana Roo and other governors of other states that I exposed in the sex trafficking business.

TONY JONES: And the Attorney-General - and the Attorney-General...

LYDIA CACHO: And the Attorney-General was following the orders of the governors so that proves everything. The same as the judge. She was following the orders of the governor. So, yes, it's not like good women and bad men. It's just that we all grow up also in a war-prone society and what is culturally valuable is violence and we think that we're saving life through killing people and that keeps ringing very wrongly. I mean, why is that? Why do we have to save lives by killing people? You know, stop drugs by selling guns? It makes no sense to me.

KAY HYMOWITZ: Can I just interrupt for one minute.

TONY JONES: Yeah.

KAY HYMOWITZ: There's never been a society where there hasn't been violence and, if anything, we're less violent than we used to be. You know, Steven Pinker held talks yesterday at the festival about this yesterday. There's been a big decline in violence. So I think to image that, somehow, this - first of all I'm not exactly sure what a patriarchy is. Maybe you can explain it to me.

ALISSA NUTTING: We're living in it.

KAY HYMOWITZ: What is it? It's a society...

TONY JONES: Is Steven Pinker only talking about the scale of the conflicts in the past?

KAY HYMOWITZ: No, he's...

TONY JONES: I mean the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, they caused huge numbers of casualties. There hasn't been anything on that scale but violence in society doesn't seem to be diminishing.

KAY HYMOWITZ: No, that's not what he says.

JANE CARO: No, it has fallen.

KAY HYMOWITZ: It has fallen.

JANE CARO: Yes, (indistinct)

KAY HYMOWITZ: And he said that your chances, per capita chances, of getting killed have gone way down. Way down.

TONY JONES: Is that true in Mexico?

LYDIA CACHO: No, it's not. Actually right now, no, because I do agree, of course, with that theory but it depends on politicians and the decisions they make. Sometimes they do think that people are disposable. In the case of Mexico and poor Mexicans and women in certain areas, they are absolutely disposable. Not only in Mexico but all over the world. You see it here in Australia with Aboriginal woman, you know, they still have no rights. They're taking away their lands in the Northern Territory.

KAY HYMOWITZ: Is that true, they still have no rights?

LYDIA CACHO: Of course.

TONY JONES: It's not, strictly speaking, true. Rights are constrained in some places. That is true but they're not necessarily taking away their land either. I mean land rights is a new...

LYDIA CACHO: I know.

TONY JONES: ...relatively new phenomenon here so it's a complicated story we're talking about there. Let's move on though, we've got quite a few questions on different subjects. Q&A, live from the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Our next question comes from Bo Robertson.

TOY BOYS

BO ROBERTSON: It was in the past a rule that powerful, rich, strong men used to attract weak, sweet, helpless, incompetent women. Why would it be so wrong that powerful, rich, strong, competent women should not entertain themselves with weak, sweet, incompetent and useless men and use them as toy boys, as men use young women as toy girls?

TONY JONES: Kay, I'll bring you in here, because obviously the question is related to your idea that men have been infantilised.

KAY HYMOWITZ: Yeah.

TONY JONES: And there seems to be a suggestion that that's not such a bad thing.

KAY HYMOWITZ: Well, you know, I think that the idea of marriage and companionship has changed over generations and people do expect more equality between men and women within a couple. So, for instance, you know, there used to be roles that men and women played and women had the subservient or, if not submissive in some cases, role. Men had the more domineering role. That is just not happening in the developed world anymore, at least among educated people. The expectation is that you marry or find a partner who is your equal and that seems, to me, a good thing, for the most part. However, it is true that what's happening - what I write about in my book Manning Up is that a lot of men reach their 20s and they're not really sure what the next thing is. What are they supposed to be doing? They are confronting women who are absolutely competent and confident and fit and fashionable and seem to have it all together and they're not sure what's happening next. They're not sure what their role is and I do actually think it's partly because of what women are saying, which is, on the one hand, you've got to be - you've got to treat me as an equal and on the other hand I don't really need you, right? I can raise children by myself. I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself and I think that the message that men are getting is very mixed.

TONY JONES: You write about a kind of backlash that you see among young men in particular and a kind of bitterness that you've seen develop. Tell us about that?

You know, after I wrote about this infantilisation or this adolescence - this elongated adolescence - that I was seeing among a lot of men, I heard from many men who were quite angry and said it's not us. It's the women. You know, it's not us that are the problem here. It's the women. And they felt what I just said, which is that they were getting an awful lot of mixed messages from women. On the one hand, women seem to want men who were strong and confident and kind of manly in a traditional sense and, on the other hand, they seem to want a nice guy but then they would turn...

ALISSA NUTTING: How dare a woman want a nice man!

KAY HYMOWITZ: But now, wait a minute. Now, wait a minute. But what they would say to me is, oh, but if you're a nice guy, they throw you over for the not so nice guy.

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: So you mean like the strong, confident, manly guy, by default, is not nice or something?

KAY HYMOWITZ: No. No. Not at all. Not at all. I'm saying that, from their experience, they're raised - they're raised to be nice guys, you know. They're all told you've got to treat women as equals. You've got to be fair with women and they don't want to be treated as sex objects.

JANE CARO: But do they do that for a reward or do they do it because it's the right thing to do? Like, the point is if you really are a good person, a person who wants to respect others and be respected, you do it because it is actually the grown up and right thing to do it.

KAY HYMOWITZ: Absolutely.

JANE CARO: To turn around and say, well, I was a nice guy and therefore I expected to get a whole lot of chicks to sleep with me and love me, well, then they are infantilised.

KAY HYMOWITZ: Well, you're right, yeah.

JANE CARO: And it's about time they grew up and saying, "Oh, she made me infantilised," really is infantile.

TONY JONES: I'm going to go back to Kay. Just pick up that point, because the feedback you say that you are getting from young guys is that they were saying that young women or feeling that young women were entitled, dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling.

KAY HYMOWITZ: There are not my terms.

TONY JONES: No, I agree. This is what you...

ALISSA NUTTING: We're talking to nice guys, yeah.

TONY JONES: This is what you said - this is what you say they were telling you.

KAY HYMOWITZ: Yes.

TONY JONES: What's that feedback mean to you?

KAY HYMOWITZ: Well, what it means to me is that, look, all the scripts are gone. You know, it used to be you got into your 20s and you sort of knew what was expected of you and let's face it, there are a lot of guys out there that don't have the best emotional intelligence, as we sometimes refer to it, and they're trying to figure out, well, how are they supposed to act? Let me just give you a very, very simple example. You want to go out with a girl. Do you call her for a date? Are you supposed to pay? A lot of guys are kind of awkward and they cannot figure out what's expected of them. Women are often making more money than they are and they're very confused about it. I'm not trying to...

TONY JONES: Perhaps they should wait and see who pays.

KAY HYMOWITZ: Well, who makes the first move, you mean, yeah.

MULTIPLE SPEAKERS TALK AT ONCE

ALISSA NUTTING: He could also talk to a woman.

TONY JONES: Let's bring in, Alissa.

ALISSA NUTTING: You know, you could talk to your date, I think. It's okay to use language.

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Oh, definitely.

LYDIA CACHO: It's very usefully, actually.

JANE CARO: Isn't that the process of growing up though? And aren't young women just as uncertain as young men when they're first setting out into partnering up and dating and what's expected of them? And often, for young women, it's am I supposed to sleep with them straight away and will they stay with me if I don't? And all those kinds of questions. I think this is just about being young and I don't see why young men should be protected from the emotional difficulty that goes with being young. The only way you grow up is by banging up against difficulty. We shouldn't be rescuing them. Guys, we're doing you a favour.

TONY JONES: Alissa, I see you nodding there and yet your dangerous idea that you brought here is that women can be sexual predators. Is it just a very rare case that you're talking about or are you making the case that there is a generic sexual predator nature?

ALISSA NUTTING: No, I think that it does happen and, unfortunately, I think when it does happen in our society we're so used to seeing women as passive sexually, as the victim, that often it's not believed or male victims feel that it's a shameful thing. They feel that they're not able to tell anyone because they would not be believed or they would be laughed at. So, I mean, I kind of feel like this gender binary really sort of cloaks victimhood, you know, when females are sexual predators.

TONY JONES: Kajsa, I stopped you from getting in earlier. I mean do you think young men are infantilised? Do you sort of see this as a general problem?

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: I mean haven't they always been? Like, I mean, I don't know. No, I think if you look at the countries where like, you know, men are still mamma's boys up until they're 40, these are like, you know, Italy and countries like where, you know, equality hasn't really moved that far, as in Sweden, for example. So I would argue the opposite, you know, really. Once you get more equality, you know, the mother doesn't have time to take care of her sons so he has to take care of himself and he grows up faster, you know. When he's 18, he's out of the house. You know, he has to clean his own apartment, you know, cook his own food and, also, I'd disagree with you on the fact that often the young girl earns more than they young guy. You know, I don't know a single country where that's the case. If you look at the gender gap, you know, in payment, you know, men are earning more over the place.

KAY HYMOWITZ: In the United States, women in their 20s, who are childless - those that don't have kids - are earning more than men.

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Oh, really?

KAY HYMOWITZ: In their 20s, yes. It changes once they have kids absolutely.

TONY JONES: I'll just Lydia in here. Do you think what we're talking about is a kind of, you know, very much focussing on the West and how affluent young men in the West behave?

LYDIA CACHO: No, I think there's a tremendous masculinity crisis around the world and it has a lot to do with the fact that the women did our job. I mean for a hundred years feminists all over the world have been doing a lot of work by educating ourselves in a different way. We're doing a lot better than our grandmothers did and, in the way of doing that, a lot of men changed. Of course they have. But a lot of them failed to teach their sons and their grandsons how to change and how to be better citizens and better men in front of an equal society. So, yes, it's a masculinity crisis and I find it really interesting and fascinating and I think that I've seen kids, teenagers, that are trying to find the way into this and making the right questions. So I think we should listen to them and asking also the right questions to them. Not only who's educating them, the mothers mainly, of course. Women and men reproduce sexism because we live in a sexist society, of course, and we have to question that all the time and not everybody is allowed to question sexism and not everybody is prepared to question sexism. So we have to go there. We have to go into this conversation and we need more men that are doing not only the talking but the walking. We need more men that are good in masculinity.

TONY JONES: Okay. Well, I want to hear everyone on this but we actually have a question that raises this subject directly from the audience. So let's go to Kate Renault.

RAISING BOYS

KATE RENAUD: Good evening. This does go directly to what you're talking about. As the mother of a young son myself, it's something that I'm constantly asking myself how best to raise the next generation of children, and particularly boys, to promote gender equality. It's a culture where my two-year-old son is already bombarded every day with who he should or shouldn't be, just because of his gender and I feel like it's a daily battle then to raise up children who are going to champion the cause, not of women but of equality and not for the sake of women but for the sake of the betterment of society as a whole. So I'm just interested to hear how you - how all of you panellists - would think we can help serve the future and raise up a generation who will promote this cause.

TONY JONES: Kajsa.

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Oh, man, that's a big question. How do you make the world better? You know, I don't know. I don't think young guys are so confused, you know. I don't recognise that. Maybe it's an American thing, you know. But in Sweden they're not confused at all, you know, and I think they just find it...

TONY JONES: Do you think about these issues though in raising your own child?

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: I don't really think about it, you know. He's going to be all right.

JANE CARO: That's how you do it.

KAY HYMOWITZ: That's not the way American parents feel. They're very, very worried.

TONY JONES: There's a lot of helicopter parents in America.

KAY HYMOWITZ: Yeah, that's exactly right. No, I think that raising kids in the United States, it's a tricky business for a lot of reasons, which are probably beyond this conversation. But, you know, I want to bring in my other issue here about the breakdown of family, because what's happening in the United States is that we have many, many communities where there are just no fathers at all. In other words, this isn't just a number of women making a choice to become single mothers. This is a mass phenomenon in, at least, certain communities, not everywhere by any means. And those boys are growing up with mothers and only mothers and they're not - if anything they have more problems dealing with women than those who are growing up in married couple homes. So, I have to ask, well, what is it that we think we're teaching kids when we say to them we don't really need you? We say to young boys we don't really need you. You know, your mother did it fine. Your grandmother did it fine and we don't thing...

LYDIA CACHO: But are they growing in a laboratory or something? I mean are they growing in a laboratory, in a lab?

KAY HYMOWITZ: (Indistinct)

LYDIA CACHO: Yes, because, I mean, they have single mother but they are surrounded by human beings...

KAY HYMOWITZ: They are not...

LYDIA CACHO: ...(indistinct), teachers and friends and grandfathers or grandmothers or lesbian grandmothers or gay grandfathers or uncles. I mean they're surrounded by human beings that are teaching them behaviour all the time. We don't only learn from mothers and fathers.

KAY HYMOWITZ: But when you grow up in a community where men are not working often or if they are working they're in very, very low-level jobs and they are not involved with the mother anymore. Listen, the fact is kids are much more influenced by their parents than they are by anybody else and we could talk about uncles and aunts and all that, it's not the same.

TONY JONES: I'm just going to interrupt there because we have a few questions on this. We were going to come to them later but we'll come to them now. The first question on this subject is Dilshad Matharu. Dilshad.

SINGLE PARENTHOOD NOT A CHOICE

DILSHAD MATHARU: My question is with Kay. Sometimes parents become a single parent due to issue with their marriage or a relationship that are beyond their control. It is always a situation that is chosen but rather one that is thrust upon them. What evidence do you have that the quality of parenting of the child cannot be the same standard as two-parent family where often one parent become the absent parent due to work commitment?

KAY HYMOWITZ: The evidence I have is from decades of research in the United States and elsewhere. At this point we have many, many years of watching children from both married couple homes and single parent homes and the research shows over and over and over again, I mean there's barely any exception, that the children who, on average - on average - and I want to really emphasise this because it may well be that any one single mother is doing a far better job than her sister who is married. You know, we're not talking about an individual case here. We're talking about the very large numbers and looking at those kids and what we find is those kids have more emotional problems, they are doing less well in school, they are less likely to graduate high school, they're less likely to go to college, they're more likely to become single parents themselves. That is what the research says. It's not my, you know, my opinion.

ALISSA NUTTING: But you're using coded words like unemployed and low-level. I mean, you know, to what extent is class factoring in here? If you have, you know, an economically disrupted home...

KAY HYMOWITZ: I will answer that. I will answer that.

ALISSA NUTTING: ...how is that relative (indistinct)?

KAY HYMOWITZ: It's very - it's very easy to answer, actually. If you control for income, same thing. The children do not do as well in single parent homes.

ALISSA NUTTING: My parents are married and my childhood was crap.

KAY HYMOWITZ: That is the...

TONY JONES: I want to hear from other panellists on this. Kajsa, I mean, I think you're bringing up a child on your own. Is that correct?

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Yeah, I'm a single mother on and off really, not right now because I'm obviously here and my child is back home so now his father is there. But, yeah, it's been like that on and off.

TONY JONES: So what do you think when you hear this generic argument made or general argument made that, in general, on average, children from single parent homes do worse?

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Well, what are you supposed to do, you know? I mean if the guy takes off, like, you know, sorry, what can I do? You know, that's just life. I don't think so. You know, I was brought up by a single mum. So was my mum, you know, and I think I'm all right.

TONY JONES: Let's hear Jane.

JANE CARO: I think if we actually look back historically, single parents may have been the most common form of family because what we forget is that mothers died like flies in childbirth for, oh, I don't know, hundreds of years. There's a reason why there are so many stepmothers in fairytales. There really is an actual reason.

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Yeah, you're right.

JANE CARO: We never talk about widows and widowers when we talk about single parents. We tend to always look at the single mother in a really critical and harsh way and yet we idealise single fathers. Oh, they're marvels of creation when they take over their children and look after them. They're extraordinary. Everybody wants to help them. You know what, sometimes life goes wrong for people. Sometimes relationships are terrible and sometimes kids suffer from that because it's terrible when your parents break up. Of course it is and of course it's going to make it harder for the kids, both girls and boys. But that's life, bad things happen and we can't keep trying to protect our children from bad things or try to trap people in relationships which make them miserable for the sake of the children. I don't think that's ever worked terribly well.

TONY JONES: I'll just quickly go to Kay to respond to that because, I mean, the other part of your argument is that people in marriages or children who are in families with marriages, I think you would probably argue stable marriages, have better outcomes?

KAY HYMOWITZ: Well it's not just my argument, it's what the research shows. I mean there's just no - there's no disagreement on this. Now, Jane, you know, Jane raises a question about the individual. Again, we keep coming back to, well, my parents or my child or my - we're not really talking about you as individuals. We're talking about a social phenomenon and the change in families throughout the developed world has - is problematic on a social level, okay? Now, it's not telling any one of you what to do. I can't tell you that. And there are many - and the questioner before, there are many situations where you just have no choice and, of course, in those situations you've got to do what you've got to do and probably your child will do just fine. I'm not denying that. I'm simply saying that when we're thinking about the broader society, we're thinking about poverty, we're thinking about inequality, we're thinking about these neighbourhoods that I'm telling you about in the United States where there are no fathers, period. No grandfathers. There are no grandfathers or uncles around. Then you've got a social problem and you're no longer talking about your family, or your family, we're talking...

LYDIA CACHO: But you're talking about somebody's family in the Bronx. I mean the story is - I'm sorry, I'm an investigative journalist so I know this is a basic thing for journalists. The story is the sum of all individual stories.

KAY HYMOWITZ: Yes, it is.

LYDIA CACHO: That's what a story is actually. So, yes, you have to talk about the individual stories and then, of course, you have to understand them in a broader sense.

KAY HYMOWITZ: But one of the questions is what has changed? I don't agree with you, Jane, about families being more likely to be single parent families in the past.

JANE CARO: The nuclear family is a fairly recent phenomenon.

KAY HYMOWITZ: No, it is not. Actually it's not.

JANE CARO: Okay!

KAY HYMOWITZ: I mean it goes back to England in the...

JANE CARO: Okay!

KAY HYMOWITZ: I'll show you the history.

JANE CARO: Okay.

KAY HYMOWITZ: It goes back to England in the 16th century and it's very, very - it's been quite successful arrangement despite our, you know, many of us, and I can tell you stories myself, who have had experiences which are not particularly happy ones. It has worked on a social level and we don't really have anything to replace and if I can just - I don't mean to dominate.

TONY JONES: Well, we're actually going to try and get to some other questions.

KAY HYMOWITZ: Yeah, I'm sorry.

TONY JONES: So I think we might actually do that. The next question - and it is a very different subject - its comes from Daisy D'Souza.

SOCIAL MEDIA ABUSE

DAISY D'SOUZA: Hi. Social media can be a great civic space for women but it's also given the vicious a voice. People have begun to misuse it for sexual exploitation, sexual harassment and emerging forms of violence like cyber bullying, cyber stalking and privacy violations. I'm just wondering what you think we can do to change that and how we can prevent an environment where violence against women is tolerated and normalised.

TONY JONES: Lydia.

LYDIA CACHO: Huh! I knew that you were going to do that. Yes, the cyberspace has shown us how much we've normalised all kinds of violence, of course, and gender violence in particular. But also it has shown us how prone kids are, especially children, to enter the social networks and to be accepted by others by reproducing this behaviour that has to do with cyber bullying or mocking others. So I think we do not understand how big the phenomena is and we do need more mothers, fathers and extended families - because I do think that I have a very different idea of what families are - but we need families to understand and educators to understand what the two phenomena are. First, the individual phenomena of what violence is to children and then the other one how they expose that violence and how they feel detached once they are using an electronic mean to express as violence. I've investigated cyber pornography for a long, long time and it's quite strange to see all these teenage kids that are watching pornography on the Internet and, once I talked to them in schools, for example, they admitted they watched pornography. Of course the pornography they watch is child or teen pornography because they're looking for people their age having sex, not for old people. But once you talk to them about violence, they start asking the questions and they come up with very, very strange comments. For example, one 12-year-old kid said, "Well, but I don't know, they're not really real, right?" And they are watching pornography at 12 but they don't think the person is real on the other side. It's not real to them. The other...

TONY JONES: The other part of that equation, from your point of view, and this is related to your book, is that you say that pornography exposes teenagers to traffickers, sex traffickers?

LYDIA CACHO: Yes, of course. There are a lot of investigations on that, a lot of journalists in the US have done that. Some of them have even posed as predators to get some kids to prove that these men are doing that around the world. Yes, of course there's adults doing it but regarding that particular question, what's the youth around the world doing with this new space, I think that we're not discussing this enough at schools and at home and understanding it better because we really do not understand the way technologies work.

TONY JONES: Alissa.

ALISSA NUTTING: I mean, I think part of why it is accepted online is because it's accepted off-line, you know. You know, I think part of the reason it's such a dangerous space online for women is because off-line it's such a dangerous space for women. So I think gains of equality in the real world will also lead to ones on Internet. But I agree wholeheartedly about the psychology. I mean, when, you know, someone is getting cyber bullied, for example, I mean that's so much different to have these hundreds of instantaneous responses layered onto you. It's something different for the brain to process.

LYDIA CACHO: Absolutely.

TONY JONES: Jane, sorry.

JANE CARO: It's very interesting about young people watching pornography and I think one of the things that's going wrong is we won't talk to them about it. We won't talk - parents are embarrassed, schools aren't allowed and there's a lot of pressure for us to sort of try and stop them doing it, which is just not going to be possible, I don't think. But what adults need to do is actually talk to children about how pornography is made, what it's about, why it's a performance, it's not about real sex between people who hopefully love each other or at least have some kind of attachment. We need to talk about the pornography with our children instead of just going oh no, my child's not watching it. No, no, no, it's not happening, because that means they don't get the real information they need to get about good, healthy adult sex.

TONY JONES: Kajsa?

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Oh, I don't know what good, healthy adult sex is but you know speaking about...

JANE CARO: Well, it's what you enjoy.

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Oh, okay. Okay. No, but speaking about cyber bullying and all that and, you know, all these Twitter mobs and stuff that are happening, I think it's very interesting how cultural that is, you know, that it's not happening in all cultures. I think it's a very Anglo-Saxon type of thing and it's coming to Sweden too but if you look at countries like more Latin countries or France, you know, you don't have that to the same extent. I've been thinking about why. You know, is it something about, you know, being Protestant, you know, and Catholic cultures wouldn't have that or you know but you really don't have that everywhere, you know. Like in Spain, for example, the online culture is very different, you know. You have a lot of jokes. You have a lot of word games and stuff like that but you don't have the same mob phenomena, everybody going, your Honour, against someone.

TONY JONES: You say it's coming to Sweden?

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: It's coming to Sweden too. You know, everything American comes to Sweden.

TONY JONES: Yeah, that happens here, I'm afraid. This is Q&A live from the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Our next question comes from Suraia Shahnawaz.

SURROGACY - WIN WIN

SURAIA SHAHNAWAZ: In my country of birth, Bangladesh, I have seen poverty first hand and what it can do to the population and especially to the women. They make them totally powerless. If a woman can raise herself out of this poverty and restore her dignity, while simultaneously giving another woman the gift of life, can't we just - isn't there a way to facilitate surrogacy so that both parties can benefit and, at the same time, rather than criminalising it and forcing it to go underground?

TONY JONES: Kajsa?

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Oh, finally that's my topic. Well, yeah, well, I've written a book that's on surrogacy and prostitution. So, basically ...

SURAIA SHAHNAWAZ: (Indistinct)

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Yeah, it was about that so, um, basically in my book I compare surrogacy to prostitution. I see it as the other side, you know. It's a growing industry that if we don't stop it, I think it's going to become as big as the prostitution industry and we're going to have the same side effects like trafficking for surrogacy, which is already starting to come up, you know, in parts of the world like China, for example, or Thailand. So, no, I don't see this as a win/win situation. I definitely don't think that poverty is an excuse for exploitation and I think surrogacy is exploitation. You know, instead of like in prostitution you're selling sex, you're selling the vagina, you're here selling your uterus, which is then being commodified as something that's, you know, not a part of the woman's self but something she can sell without being affected is the idea. And the idea is that a woman is supposed to get pregnant, carry the child for nine months, give it away, never to see it again, for money, right? And I also think that's baby trade because when she's handing the child over she receives money. So if that's not baby trade, you know, I don't know what baby trade is.

TONY JONES: What about the old feminist notion that a woman's body is her own and that if you want to take that decision to make a financial arrangement out of having a child that should be an individual decision?

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Well, I've never seen a demonstration of women walking on the streets saying like we have to be surrogates now or you know we're going to die. Like, who's driving this demand? It's the demand, you know. I mean it's the buyers that want this to happen. What's happening is in the West increasingly we're outsourcing pregnancy like we've outsourced so many other things. You know, like nowadays, for example, heterosexual couples who either got married late and can't have children anymore or, for a number of reasons, don't want to have children, for example, there are also women who don't want to ruin their bodies and they would rather have somebody else do it for them. You also have the gay male couple who wants to have a child specifically for them but in all these cases, you know, there's a huge inequality going on. You know, it's the rich, white people of the West who are basically outsourcing pregnancy to poor, working class women of the developing world and who have to give up their babies. I'm saying just because you're poor doesn't mean you don't have feelings. It's a quite, you know, heavy thing to carry a child. You might relate to it, you might feel something and just give it away.

A QUESTION FROM TWITTER

TONY JONES: I would like to hear the rest of the panel on this. First of all we do have a Twitter question that just came through for you, Kajsa: "What if the surrogacy is altruistic?"

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Well, you know, if she doesn't get paid, does it make it any better? You know, sometimes I think that's even worse. You know, if she's pregnant for nine months, I mean, that's not like drinking a glass of water. You know, I mean, your whole life changes.

TONY JONES: Well, it can't possibly be worse if you think that it's immoral to do it the other way.

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: I would say it it hides the exploitation, in a sense, because it looks like, oh, it's just a friend doing it for a friend. I mean, first of all we have to remember that very few women would do this without getting paid. You know, I mean, going through something like a pregnancy is a very big thing, not to mention the pain of childbirth and also there have been cases where women have gotten infertile from surrogacy or have even died in surrogacy. So you're taking a big risk. The supply of women wanting to do that for free is not big enough to satisfy this demand. So the altruistic side is really just a smoke screen. It's a very small number. In reality, we're talking about a big industry here.

TONY JONES: Let's hear from the other panellists. Alissa, what do you think?

ALISSA NUTTING: I think that it's the economics where, you know, it can become exploitative. I don't think it's inherently exploitative. I had a hellish pregnancy but there are a few women in the world whom I love enough to be a surrogate for if they needed it and I wouldn't want that right refused of me.

TONY JONES: Jane?

JANE CARO: Oh, yeah, I think the wisdom of Solomon is sometimes required for these questions. Look, my view is, in the end, that where there is demand there will be supply and where we have horrendous inequality in the world between the rich white people that Kajsa is talking about and people in the Third World that the questioner here brought up, then we are likely to have a situation where people want something badly enough they'll find a way to get it. And my problem is I've never seen banning actually work. All that tends to happen is it goes underground and, where you might have had some chance, not of making it good or perfect or right or anything else, but at least some regulation, by driving it underground there is no regulation and the exploitation can just run rampant and it becomes criminalised then. And then you do the same thing as the war on drugs, you end up with organised crime being involved, blah, blah, blah. So, in the end, I always think the instinct to ban almost has the opposite of the desired affect.

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: But are you in favour of legalising everything?

JANE CARO: No, but I am in favour of legalising things where people choose to do something, they get a benefit and it is going to happen anyway. I don't know - I really see this as one of those where it's only going to get worse if you decide it's just against the law.

TONY JONES: Kay?

KAY HYMOWITZ: Yeah, well, you know, it's true that if you try to ban something like this it's still going to happen but that's true with everything. You can ban theft, for instance, and people are still going to steal.

JANE CARO: I know, yeah.

KAY HYMOWITZ: So laws have a kind of symbolic purpose, as well as a practical purpose. You're not just trying to ban it. You're also trying to say something about what we value and what we value, of course, is that a child - a woman who carries a child, the child is hers and that is, it seems to me, a very basic and fundamental human desire.

TONY JONES: Lydia, can I bring you in on this? Obviously, the comparison has been raised with child trafficking, something that you've written a lot about. Do you think it's a fair comparison?

LYDIA CACHO: I'm just doing an investigation on Cancun, where I live, in Mexico, of a clinic opened by two American doctors in Cancun, who, because, of course, they cannot do it in the States without getting caught so they came to Mexico to do it and they started getting indigenous women, very young women to get the children that these fancy couples want to buy in Mexico. It's illegal in Mexico. Surrogacy is - I mean if you get paid it's considered, by law, trafficking. So, yes, it's quite complex and obviously it has a lot to do with poverty, class and gender issues and it's very delicate unless you really explain what's going on, who is buying, who is selling and in what context they are doing so. And it is absolutely linked to organised crime in many, many places.

TONY JONES: Kajsa is calling for, essentially, a global ban, I would imagine. Is that right?

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Yeah, well, definitely. I think we have to stop this, you know, before it becomes too big and I think we have to, instead of, you know, looking at having a child as a human right and how are we going to satisfy, especially the upper middle class in the West - because that's really who we're talking about, nobody's talking about, you know, oh there is a poor woman in a poor country who is infertile. How are we going to help her? No, we're talking about, you know, the rich couples in the West. They want kids. They have to have kids. You know, all of a sudden their very specific desire to have a child genetically related to themselves, because that's what they want. They don't want to adopt. They want something that looks like them with an absent mother. They don't want the mother involved. You know that's the big demand in surrogacy. Because, if you look at it, there's nothing that stops them from, for example, you know, pairing up with a lesbian couple or a single woman and having a child, raising it together. No, this is not the question. They want the mother to be absent. She's just supposed to provide the pregnancy as if it was, you know, just a service, just a job like anything, hand over the baby, never to see it again, and I just don't think that's a human right. Sorry, there's no human right to have children. There is, however, a convention on the rights of the child, which says that the child has the right to the parents. You know, now you can ask, okay, what is a parent and so on but I think surrogacy is the only case where the mother is not even being tested so as to see is she capable of taking care of the child. You know, you're just making an arrangement. Just hand it over.

TONY JONES: We have to move on. We've got a few other questions still to get to. The next question is from Diana Mbaka. Diana.

CAREER CHOICE PROSTITUTION

DIANA MBAKA: My question is also for Kajsa. In your book you state that prostitution is an enemy of sexual liberation and free will. Former journalist Amanda Goff recently revealed that she chose a career in prostitution and stated, "No one is taking advantage of me anymore. I'm going to become empowered." What are your thoughts on prostitution as a conscious career choice in a first world country?

TONY JONES: Let's not start with Kajsa. You were just speaking a moment ago.

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Oh, do I have to answer that? No.

TONY JONES: I'm going to bring you in. I promise you. Jane, let's hear from you on this? What are your thoughts on prostitution as a conscious career choice in a first-world country?

JANE CARO: Well, I'm going to say something really dangerous now. When you have a society where women's main currency is really their sexual favours, their ability to reproduce, then a lot of what women do is a form of prostitution. For example, I would argue that traditional marriage, which included conjugal rights particularly when women were not able to go to work or were fired when they first got married and were basically selling their bodies and their reproductive rights to her husband, he bought them, by giving her room and board in return, was a form of prostitution. So I think we really have to discuss what we mean by prostitution. At least the women who choose it as a career choice, freely and uncoerced - that's very, very important - only have to put up with their customer for about an hour. Once upon a time it was a lifetime, ladies. A lifetime!

TONY JONES: Kajsa, I will bring you in here.

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Sorry, but that's a very abstract comparison. I mean, we're talking here about a world in which, you know, a lot of people in prostitution have sex with, you know, up to 15 buyers a day, right. I mean if you look at, for example, Amsterdam, you know, just to pay the place that you're renting where the whole thing is going to take place you need to have three buyers every day just to pay that. If you don't get three buyers you're going to end up below zero, right? So in response to you, I think that journalist might soon realise it wasn't really that empowering and I also think that that is not representative of the majority of people who enter prostitution, don't have a background in journalism, sorry.

TONY JONES: Can I just interrupt you? In Sweden, they have a law where the customers are prosecuted but not the sex workers.

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Yes.

TONY JONES: Does that actually work?

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Yeah, it does, actually. We were the first country to pass that law, so we kind of just did it like an experiment, you know, let's see what happens and it was the first time that instead of punishing the prostitute, which always had been the case previously, we focused on demand, on the buyer. So in Sweden you can sell sex anywhere, you know, outside a church, school, doesn't matter. You're not prosecuted but you cannot pay for sex because the way that we see it is prostitution is incompatible with equality between the sexes. So there's nothing in that about, you know, the prostitute being a victim or something. It is the existence of prostitution in a society affects everyone, affects gender relations between men and women generally and is incompatible with equality. And my definition of prostitution personally is it's sex between two people. One person that wants it and one person that doesn't, you know. If you don't have that criteria you don't have prostitution. If you have two people who want each other, who really want to have sex, they don't pay obviously. If you have two people and nobody wants to have sex, of course there is no sex, right. So prostitution happens when one person wants it, the other person doesn't and the first person pays the second person, right? And that's very clear, you know. She might want the money but if you ask any person in prostitution you can take the money now, you know, you can leave or you can stay for the sex, how many do you think are going to stay for the sex? I mean really.

TONY JONES: Lydia, I'll bring you in because you actually have a global perspective on this.

LYDIA CACHO: Well, yes. I agree, of course, this journalist that said that she will become a prostitute and probably 10% of all the women - thousands of women that I've interviewed in my career for these investigations on trafficking are making a decision, a conscious decision, in a protected environment and they can choose their clients and they can be VIP and even in those conditions they are exposed to violence in many, many ways. But then what about the rest of the women, which is public policy now we're talking about, is like, if the rest, let's suppose 80% of the women that are in the sex trade industry are being exploited, abused and have no real choices or come not only from poverty but from other conditions in which they have normalised violence, for example, child abuse and paedophilia for a long, long time which is a problem we have in every country in the world, then what about these women if they have normalised violence in such a way that they do not understand that this is truly exploitation or this is - there's a way out, then you do have to have public policy in which they have choices. I have to say with the Swedish law, which is really important, because I followed three cases for a while for my book, three of the women - one in particular is an African woman that was given the choice to have a visa and she was given the choice to study and she was given the choice to bring her kids to the country to get away from prostitution and she did it willingly and she did it happily and she is just amazingly happy now and she doesn't feel like she was forced out of prostitution. She feels like she got a chance, for the first time in her entire life. I know this is just a single case but we are documenting a lot of cases like this in Sweden. So the other part of the law is that they are giving them choices and chances and opportunities. So this is, of course, we have to talk about all these issues but it's a gender equality issue. I don't see a lot of women in advanced countries that are exposing themselves to prostitution, as we see in countries in which it's the only choice they have.

TONY JONES: Alissa, we only have time for brief answers at the moment because we're still trying to get to one last question but what do you think?

ALISSA NUTTING: I mean I guess I sort of see, you know, society over and over kind of protecting men at the expense of women, you know, so I mean I really - one of the things that just bothers me so much about it is that all of the social stigma of prostitution, legal or illegal, always seems to go to the woman. In America when a prostitute is murdered there is this like almost, you know, sort of reluctance, you know, to even investigate it. When a man is murdered they don't say, well, wait, let's see if he ever visited a prostitute before we decide whether or not his life is worth investigating. You know, so I really think that, legal or illegal, the social stigma has to change.

TONY JONES: Kay?

KAY HYMOWITZ: Well, this is very interesting questions but I'm always puzzled by why we are so focused on prostitution. I think that feminism is doing itself a disservice by focussing so much on something that affects so few women. I don't agree that prostitution affects all of us. I don't agree with that. And in the - you know, I just did a little bit of Googling on these figures before. There's 3.5 billion women in this world, very, very few of them are prostitutes. So it's puzzling to me the amount of attention it's getting as a feminist issue, as opposed to the number of women involved.

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Yeah, but the number of men involved, though, I mean, if you look at Germany where one in every four men pays for sex, he has maybe daughters, he has a wife, she doesn't know that. You know, that affects his way of thinking about women.

KAY HYMOWITZ: Well does that affect the way - okay, all right.

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: No, go on. Go on.

KAY HYMOWITZ: No. No.

LYDIA CACHO: No, I have to say something. I know it's very quick but it's simple. Victor Malarek, is a Canadian investigative reporter, is an amazing journalist, he wrote a book on prostitution first and sex trafficking and then he ended up writing an amazing book about the johns, who are the clients. He talked to a lot of them and the investigation shows that what they want out of prostitution is submission, is to be able to exercise the violence they cannot exercise with the woman in their lives. So there's a component of violence against women within the prostitution issue that it's a feminist issue, at least for me, and, of course, when it's trafficking, when it's slavery as we know, then it's a must.

TONY JONES: Okay, I'm going to have to call a halt to that part of the discussion. We've got time for just one last question. It's from Helen Bitossi.

ADVICE TO YOUNG WOMEN

HELEN BITOSSI: Good evening. Today, in Australia, many adolescent girls and young women are exposed to really positive feminist messages like Lean In and Like a Girl. I'm really interested to know your opinions on what the key message for adolescent girls and young women in Australia today is and what you think is most important for them to enact on.

TONY JONES: Okay, time for brief answers from everyone. Jane, and perhaps you should explain to those who don't know what Lean In and Like a Girl are, what that is.

JANE CARO: Well, Lean In is Cheryl Sandberg's book, where she encourages women to take a more proactive stance in their careers and ask for promotion and all that kind of thing and even she admits that that's extremely difficult and often doesn't work out terribly well for women when they do that. Women are caught between a rock and a hard place. If they don't ask for what they want, they're thought of as being nice and feminine but they don't get what they want. If they ask for what they want they're thought of as being pushy and difficult, so they don't get what they want. It's a really neat little conundrum. I think - and Like A Girl was a really lovely video, where young - people were asked run like a girl and they did this floppy caricature, a really awful sexist kind of view of how girls run. Then they asked little girls run like a girl and they run as fast as they could and they threw a ball as hard as they could and so it was very much pointing out how we condition people to think of being like a girl as an insult. It was very, very good.

TONY JONES: Brilliant summary. So your advice?

JANE CARO: My advice is to be yourself. Do not allow anyone to mould your shape into something that doesn't feel like you. Be yourself and always say what you think and do not fear what other people think and don't seek approval. There is nothing in seeking approval that will make you happy. The only thing to do is be 100% yourself. I would give exactly the same advice to young men.

TONY JONES: Alissa?

ALISSA NUTTING: Absolutely, I would say share your voice, understand what social privileges you yourself have and work hard to give to those who have less than you do.

TONY JONES: Kay?

KAY HYMOWITZ: I would give the same advice to men as I would to a woman and I would say find work that you like and that you're good at and be very careful with the most important decision of your life, which is who is the mother or father of your child.

TONY JONES: Kajsa?

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Wow, I wish I would have followed that.

KAY HYMOWITZ: See!

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: Well, I don't...

TONY JONES: In retrospect would you like to give that?

KAJSA EKIS EKMAN: No. No. What if he's watching the show? I don't know if I have any good advice. I'm not so good at following them but I would just say, you know, don't have sex if you don't want to and if you do want to, do it, but it should be for yourself, not because you're being paid, because you're being coerced, because you're being pressured but because you feel like it. Don't have kids if you don't feel like having children and going to feminism but only to a certain extent and after that take over all the other topics. Like, I don't know why we're talking about women all the time. We should talk about geopolitics, economies, science and not just girls and their bodies all the time, you know.

TONY JONES: This is a great chance for us to do something we don't do a lot, perhaps you do. Let's go to Lydia for a final point.

LYDIA CACHO: Well, it's own your body, own your emotions, own your intelligence. You're an amazing creature and maybe one day, when you're old enough, you will finally conquer Q&A and have an all-women panel.

TONY JONES: Thank you. That's all we have time for and we can reflect on the fact that I imagine an all-women panel probably excludes me. Please thank our dangerous thinkers: Jane Caro, Alissa Nutting, Lydia Cacho, Kajsa Ekman and Kay Hymowitz. And special thanks to the Sydney Opera House, the St James Ethics Centre and this great audience. Give yourselves a quick round of applause. Thank you. Now, we'll be back next Monday for a rock 'n' roll Q&A with: rock legend Jimmy Barnes; the former head of Rupert Murdoch's punk anarchist News Corp, Kim Williams; the Parliamentary Secretary for Social Services - I don't think she's got any rock 'n' roll credentials - Concetta Fierravanti-Wells; and the Labor senator and wannabe rock star Sam Dastyari. Until next Monday's Q&A, goodnight.