All About Women took place at the Sydney Opera House on Sunday 8 March.
Here is a recap of four of the most Irresistible events that took place that day, covering wünder- journalist Emily Maitlis, dating experts Chanté Joseph and Dr. Lisa Portolan, culture aficionado Marisa Meltzer, and the brilliant author Laila Lalami.
no spin, no compromise
Maitlis talked about how in 2022 the civil trial against then Prince Andrew brought by Virginia Giuffre never made it as far as court. Even as the royal lawyers and the Prince kept trying to pull up files on her mental health and make out that she wasn’t of sound mind, her lawyers kept pushing. The spectacle of a royal in the witness box in the Queen’s Jubilee Year proved to be too much.
“Along comes a settlement. We still don’t know the price or if the money was public, royal, or private, or even, frankly, what the difference between those three coffers is.”
Maitlis talked about her famous interview with then Prince Andrew, which has become the subject of both a film and a mini- series.
“It was meant to be a forensic document,” said Maitlis. “I rewatched it recently, and I thought the moment where I ask him about the picture where he’s got his arm around Virginia Giuffre, he uses six excuses to explain why it can’t be him. He’s saying he would never be wearing civilian clothes, and that the hand wasn’t his, that he’d never been upstairs, that he doesn’t hug civilians. I look back now and I think- it was all there.There in his face and the way he looked away.”
Emily Maitlis and Janine Perrett talked about the parallels between the BBC and the ABC, and particularly the negative ones, such as political appointments to the board, a rush to placate critics, and the problems with a knee-jerk to present two sides of an argument as equally weighted, and how much more problematic these issues are in a time of changing politics and populism and the speed at which political communication has changed.
“When we talked about Brexit negotiations at the BBC,” said Maitlis, “I could find 50 economists who hated the idea of Brexit within five minutes. But if we wanted an economist who loved the idea of Brexit, it was this one guy. His name was Patrick Minford. We always needed to find Patrick. We’d say to each other- I think Patrick has gone to see his mother today – or – wasn’t he on yesterday?”
“We’d constructed this false balance, this false equivalence.”
At the time of the conversation the war between the USA and Iran had just started, and Maitlis was asked where she saw things heading and Trumps use of the military more generally.
“If we are moving from a rules- based system to a power- based system, then you don’t get to choose if he then comes for you. Right?” said Maitlis. “You can’t just say- Oh, it’s fine to kidnap the president of Venezuela- he was a bad ‘un. Or it’s fine to get rid of the Ayatollah- he was a menace. What happens when it’s Greenland, or Canada. What are you gonna do then?”
“Everyone is trying to find the right way to appease Trump, and to see that there’s a rationale, but there isn’t. If we don’t stand up for the rules based order at this point, we don’t get the chance later.”
Maitlis then described what she sees as a mix of new freedoms and the same old rules over in the world of podcasts and away from legacy media.
“I don’t think that you have a monopoly on truth just because you work for one place or another,” she said. “You have to take the journalistic rules by which you live with you. I like checking data. I like checking quotes.”
“We’re in a very democratised place now. You choose what the news is. We don’t have that bulletin structure anymore, If you just want the animal podcast, you go and look for the animal podcast. You might go for what I call the quarter past the hour sort of stories. And if you just want the lead stories, you’re gonna find that. We don’t we don’t get to dictate anymore what news is. It’s a different world, but we do get to insist that we do our journalism as rigorously as if we were still at the New York Times, the ABC, or the BBC.”
heterofatalism
The panel talked about the evolution of what began as hetero-pessimism, into the term now used – heterofatalism, which has been described as not giving up on love, but rather about letting go of scripts that exhaust women.
“Dating apps have been around for about 15 years now,” said Dr. Lisa Portolan, “So, I think that’s had a huge impact. But in the last five years, there’s also been the big movement in Korea called 4B – no boyfriends, no sex, no intimacy, no babies.”
“There’s also been a light shone on intimate partner violence and domestic family violence,” said Portolan, “Which has also led to this term of heterofatalism. Women have been disappointed in their heterosexual relationships, and the sense that within the relationship things are unequal.”
“There was a sense,” she added, “Of a relationship beginning with some sort of meet- cute, eyes meet across the room, tripping over his dog, or you meet on the train, this hint of soulmates. From there, the milestones get kicked off. So a lot of women used to talk about how, if they hadn’t met the one, that the next milestones couldn’t happen. Things like buying a home, getting married, having the child – all of those heterosexual milestones.”
Chanté Joseph talked about how she gave up on finding love the day after her 29th birthday.
“I first went on a dating app in my first year of uni in Bristol. It was Tinder – that was the app that people were interested in, and that was in 2015. 10 years later, in 2025, to still be on the apps I realised was a humiliation!”
“That whole thing about someone not texting back, and then you diagnosing him with something, I realised I actually didn’t have to deal with all of that. I could choose not to. It didn’t dawn on me until I got to the end of 10 years of dating that this is a choice. I was choosing to make myself miserable every single day. I felt like a weight lifted off my shoulders.”
The panel talked about the adoption by the general public of what used to be only in the domain of celebrities – the hard and soft launch of relationships, and the general conversation amongst people about when is the right time to do that. Portolan noted that if those relationships end there is an issue with the digital artefacts, which raises questions about what should be deleted, and even whether those concerned the feel need to put out statements.
“Particularly within Gen Z and the younger millennial cohort,” said Portolan, “there is a sense that posting about your boyfriend online is cringe. Younger women who are in a relationship don’t want to post about their boyfriends because they don’t want to be perceived as cringe or to be perceived as defined by this man and this relationship.”
Joseph talked about how people are so much more honest about their experiences in dating now, and how the hetero- centric romantic fantasy is disappearing.
“I don’t think people look at relationships with the same level of aspiration,” said Joseph, “because there’s always some nonsense going on in the background. Men can really derail your life. It just kind of doesn’t feel necessary.”
Portolan talked about what her research has illuminated about people’s behaviour on dating apps, and the dating apps themselves.
“There can be ghosting, rudeness, discovering someone is dating someone else. It all leads up to burnout and people feeling like it’s having a second job.This is an emotional toll and an amount of labour associated with it. People would often delete all of the dating apps at a point of absolute overwhelm, and then two weeks later, they will circle back round.”
“Someone said to me,” said Portolan, “that the longest relationship they’ve had is with the dating apps. Over the last five years or so, dating apps have become really smart about paid subscriptions about putting the hotties behind the paywall.”
The panel then discussed what an evolution in heterosexual relationships could look like. The Germaine Greer quote from The Female Eunuch that “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,” was served up as being worryingly still relevant. Dr. Lisa Portolan worried that evolution required a level of male introspection that wasn’t readily available to a lot of men, especially in light of recent research brought out by Ipsos and Kings College London, which after surveying 23,000 people in 29 countries, found that when it came to the phrase- A wife should always obey her husband- Australia ranked 11th highest in the world for strongly agree.
“I often feel like as long as we entertain men and the way that they behave,” said Joseph, “they’re never gonna see their behaviour as a problem. The world needs women to be with the guy, so that they have kids, and continue the function of the state. It’s about doing the scary thing and leaving at the first sign of disrespect.
To finish the panel touched on grey divorce and how a third of divorces in Australia are amongst those who are 50+. Dr. Lisa Portolan found that it was women, not men who were breaking the chains in the second half of life.
“Most of them are not interested in living with a partner anymore,” said Portolan. “They’re happy to engage in a heterosexual relationship, go to the movies, dinner, have a companion of sorts, but they don’t want to go back into a situation where they’re living with someone.”
“Conversely, men often do want to go into relationships where they are living with someone. They want to be looked after. It’s different.”
it girl
New York Times bestselling author Marisa Meltzer has written It Girl, unpacking Jane Birkin’s life, art and enduring style influence. Meltzer is based in New York City and also writes for The New York Times, previously penning the Me Time column in the Style section, the New Yorker, The Guardian, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, and Vogue, amongst many others.
For generations of women, Jane Birkin has been synonymous with chic, even before Hermes named a bag after her. Meltzer told a packed room how Birkin’s family almost certainly didn’t expect her to end up being a sex symbol living in France.
“Her upbringing was very delightfully British in a way,” said Meltzer. “On the one hand, we have this old money – her family became generationally wealthy because of the Victorian lace boom and she had some Earls in her family. They weren’t necessarily landed gentry – but they were upper class. Her father had been a spy and had an eye patch.”
“And then you have the side where her mother had been Nöel Coward’s muse and was an actress on the stage, which she mostly gave up in order to have children,” said Meltzer. “Her mother remained a theatrical presence in Birkin’s life until her death. She was in her silk pyjamas drinking champagne at the end of her life in her hospital bed.”
Meltzer spoke about how Birkin issues in her teenage years and early 20s, in love and in work, led her to deciding to up sticks and live in Paris.
“She had fallen in love with this cad, who was the composer of all the James Bond music- John Barry. He was 32, divorced, and had a couple kids, and she was 16 or 17 when they started dating. Her parents said that they would take them to court if they tried to get married, and so they waited until she was 18. He was never faithful to her, they had a baby, and then almost immediately, they got divorced. Jane’s parents had to deliver her the news that John had gone off to Italy with another woman.”
“So it was 1968. She has a one year old. She’s divorced. She has no real job prospects. She had moved back in with her parents and felt like she was washed up. She heard about a French movie called Slogan that was looking for a British actress. She got the part and felt she had nothing to lose.”
Once Birkin was in France, she never lived in London again. Meltzer touches on Birkins writing, her music, her relationships, and her politics in It Girl, but of course style and fashion is often the lens through which she is known.
“She always had designers making things for her,” said Meltzer. “She always looked great. She just was able to dress in a way that looked perfect, and her outfits also just aged really well. You look at photos of Jane Birkin from the 60s and 70s, and you could wear those outfits now. She had a knack for looking cool.”
Birkins politics were one of the driving forces of her life, and as Meltzer pointed out, a lot of people Birkin knew drifted to the right, even the far- right, politically as they aged, but Birkin was quite different.
“One thing that really sets Jane apart from a lot of people like Brigitte Bardot who was very much in her circle at a time, was that Jane was very political,” said Meltzer. “She was very outspoken about immigration rights. She was pro- abortion and anti- death penalty. She’s was for Palestine. She took part in many demonstrations over her whole life. This side of her gets very overshadowed by her style.”
If anything,” said Meltzer “I think she got more and more committed to progressive causes as she aged. She went to Sarajevo. She spent time helping refugees. She would put protest stickers on her Hermes bags, like Free Tibet or something about Myanmar, because she knew that they would be photographed.”
She met her last long term partner in Sarajevo, and Meltzer said they lived like they were both on a kind of humanitarian mission.
“It easy to talk about her posing naked or singing songs about orgasms, but so much of what she did day to day was working for causes that she really believed in.”
when fiction sounds the alarm
Lalami told the audience about her childhood and how in her early years in Morocco her language life split, as she was sent to a French- speaking school. So she started telling stories as a child in French, and she says that until this day she still does calculations in her head in French. Later on, English became a kind of neutral language for her, and one that created a distance which she utilises in narrative.
In Morocco, she said, “There was never any end to the assimilation. If you were somebody whose parents came from North Africa, there was a constant demand that you prove your Frenchness. By relinquishing more and more of your culture, more and more of your language. If you didn’t eat pork, that became suspicious and a sign that you’re not really French. It was fundamentally about power.”
Lalami’s novels explore the lines between class and power and control. In The Moors Account the life of a Moroccan slave exploring America which was left out of the historical record is explored, and in The Dream Hotel, the story is about an archivist at the Getty Museum who is taken to a retention centre for crimes they have yet to commit. She says it’s all fed from her time in Morocco living under French rule.
“It’s not possible for me to think about a character going about their everyday lives without also looking at how larger systems of power that colour their lives,” said Lalami. “My characters have all of the ordinary entanglements that characters have – they get married, they have affairs – but there’s also, an awareness of these larger systems.”
“James Baldwin has a great line – history is trapped in us and we are trapped in history”
“I think one of the things that fiction does well,” said Lalami, “at least for me, is that it enables me to create a world in miniature. And within that world, I get to exercise a certain amount of control.”
“In The Dream Hotel the main character Sara creates her own dream journal and her own interpretations of her dreams. It’s an exercise in enquiry, but it’s also an exercise in self-assertiveness, and asserting her identity.”
Lalami spoke about her concerns over bodily integrity and personal data being hijacked by a capitalist system that sees all the information people produce as potential profit. When she was asked by an audience member if she was worried that her books said something that the political order or the establishment might not like she simply said, “I really don’t care.”
A great mic drop for a great All About Women.
All About Women 2026
took place 8 March 2026 at the
Sydney Opera House
