Rosemary McLeod: The trouble with side partings

Presidential frontrunner Jair Bolsonaro, of the Social Liberal Party, flashes victory hand signs to supporters after voting at a polling station in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo / AP

I have a theory that side partings cause much serious trouble in the world, and something needs to be done about it.

The parting endures among conservative men – Simon Bridges among them - who long to slick the world down and run a comb through it, men who want everyone patted down nicely so they can charge ahead with the business of running things.

It's a look that harks back to the short-back-and-sides haircuts of the returned servicemen of former times, who fought hard against the modern world, with all its confusion, but lost the battle.

A minor but typical example is Clem Ready, the Gloriavale cult father of 13 children he's had a habit of beating.

There is a reason why males of uptight beliefs and side partings set up walls to keep their families well away from the danger of ideas.

Wives and children must submit to their absolute rule or face ostracism, which they're told is the worst punishment imaginable.

Being oppressed and badgered with religion, they believe it.

Ready sought name suppression after pleading guilty to assaulting two of his daughters, but failed to get it. He may still think he's doing the right thing, though. In a cult of total female subservience, the side parting makes ordinary men tyrants.

In Brazil, a side parting with similar issues won the first round of the presidential election this past week, in spite of its wearer being stabbed on the campaign trail.

Jair Bolsonaro describes his party as "the path of prosperity, liberty, family, on God's side," claiming that torture is okay, a relaxation of gun laws is a good idea, and so is bringing back the death penalty to deal with rising crime.

Bolsonaro says he wants, "not a single square centimetre" of Brazil to be set aside for its indigenous people, who he says want, "electricity, television, blonde girlfriends and internet," not to live their traditional way of life in the vast Amazon.

I doubt whether he's asked the indigenous people, who probably think blonde women are hideous, but when you have a side parting you just say things and they're true.

Naturally, like Donald Trump, whose hair defies classification, Bolsonaro doesn't believe in climate change. Or legal abortion. Or saving the great forest, which he'd rather see covered in mining and earthmoving equipment. The quick profit is the side parting way.

How like the thinking behind our own attack on giant land snails found in 2003 on the edge of a mine on the West Coast.

Today the snails live in plastic containers in a fridge, and face extinction, their habitat gone. Coal is already out of favour, and the mining company is in liquidation. But never mind.

The mega side parting of the moment belongs to Brett Kavanagh, predictably sworn in as a judge of America's Supreme Court.

Accused by one woman of sexually assaulting her in his youth, his downplaying of his excessive drinking back then contradicted by people who knew him, whatever.

His parting will grace the top bench for the rest of his life, long after people forget – if that's possible – how the American president viciously ridiculed the woman who testified against him.

It's some comfort that this year's Nobel Peace Prize went not to a preening Trump, but a Congolese surgeon and an Iraqi Yazidi activist and victim of Islamic State's abuse, who campaign against sexual violence as a weapon of war.

What with #MeToo you'd almost think women mattered.