By David Futrelle
Bettina Arndt has had quite a week, so far. On Sunday, the Aussie Men’s Rights Activist and sometime-pedophile-defender was inexplicably awarded one of Australia’s highest honors for her alleged “services to gender equity,” sparking a massive outcry from feminists and others actually committed to equality.
Then yesterday the independent Australian media outlet New Matilda released the results of a longtime inquiry into her credentials, reporting that while she’s often portrayed in the Australian press as a “clinical psychologist” or even as Dr. Arndt, she is “not a doctor, has never obtained a PhD and nor, as it turns out, is she a psychologist or clinical psychologist.”
In an interview with New Matilda, as the publication reports, Arndt
strongly denied allegations she has ever sought to intentionally mislead people about her profession.
Despite these denials, a New Matilda investigation can reveal Ms Arndt has actively participated in the promotion of material which portrays her falsely as a psychologist, clinical psychologist and doctor.
These false descriptions have been widely reproduced across hundreds of articles, radio, and television interviews, as well as on Ms Arndt’s own official website, YouTube Channel, Facebook page. Ms Arndt has curated and distributed multiple videos and images where others have falsely described her title, without correction.
Indeed, as New Matilda points out, the back cover of the first edition of her own book The Sex Diaries, from 2009, identifies her as a “clinical psychologist” with “thirty-five years of experience as a sex therapist and psychologist,” which might help to explain just how this particular rumor got started.
In Australia it’s illegal to falsely claim to be a psychologist, an offense that can carry several years of jail time or a $60,000 fine.
When New Matilda asked why she didn’t bother to correct media outlets misrepresenting her credentials more often, she said:
You can’t start every interview by correcting your host. I mean I do sometimes. [I have done] many times. Many times. But I’ve done, I don’t know how many thousands of interviews in my life. When you have a two-minute television interview and I have an important message to say I’m not going to spend the first minute going through my qualifications, am I?
Actually, she could and should correct this sort of misrepresentation every time it happens. And if she doesn’t want to take up her precious airtime with a correction she could always speak to the media outlets before her interviews to ensure they identify her correctly.
The New Matilda piece also goes into some details on other controversies surrounding Arndt, such as her weird soft spot for pedophiles. It’s well worth reading in full.
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Bettina Arndt is not a psychologist? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you!
All joking aside, I’m hoping this finally gets her award retracted and she gets the appropriate penalty for her crime. Who knows how many patients she has harmed? I can at the very least say she has hurt men as a whole, not helped.
Remember… “Nuh-UHHHH” is not a defense.
@Weird Eddie
Tell that to the Rethuglicans….
Sounds like Dr. Laura, the entertainer and physiologist who pretends she’s a psychologist. She’s also quite a misogynist.
I’m an Australian mental health worker. I’ve got a Bachelor degree in Art majoring in Psychology, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Psychology. I do not introduce myself as a psychologist as I am not a psychologist, I’m a social worker. I tell people this whenever I meet them, and remind them if they refer to me as a Doctor or a Psychologist. I do this so they know what service they are receiving.
It’s not that hard
Good grief. I’ve seen people correct an interviewer before right after the introduction. It’s usually done quite graciously: “Thank you, but I’m a (correct title), and that means I (thumbnail description of title/job).” I mean, that’s just what you DO. Realtors do this. So do dieticians. Heck, I’ve done it before when someone misheard my job title.
BA may find that award to be less of a publicity coup and more of a publicity nightmare
@ Gaebolga:
I always thought of them as rupugnican’ts… but repugnicans works, too
I’ve told them that “Nuh-UHHHH” is not a reasonable argument, nut they reply “Uh-HUH!! Everybody KNOWS”
@Weird Eddie, Gaebolga
The most accurate I’ve seen is rape-pugnicans, seeing how quick they are to be rape apologists.
Well, at the very least this has led to people finally looking at her credentials. To her, she probably thinks any publicity is good publicity, but now any google search of her name will bring up all the evidence against her.
I’d love her to spend the beginning of her interviews going over her qualifications. Mainly because I don’t know what her qualifications are and I’m curious.
You’d think she would have bought a diploma from some diploma mill to cover her tracks.
Jeebus, even JordyPete was at least a shitty one for a little while. This charlatan puts even HIM to shame.
Next, no doubt, we’ll be hearing that she molested one of her clients. (JordyPete certainly did.)
@JM But going to uni and doing all those course is hard. You might think that an essay on male pedophiles are the real victims would give you an A+ in developmental psychology, but you’d be wrong.
But the real victim here is Bettina. She’s had to face nasty journalist… BWHA-ha ha, she’s so fecked.
I have subtly shifted or omitted information about where I live and study to introduce some uncertainty should anyone ever try to connect my online ID with my offline ID, and as a result, when some people have made incorrect conclusions about, say, the city where I live I haven’t always corrected them. I’ve done that entirely from a desire to keep my promises about separating my online and offline selves for safety reasons, but I’ve NEVER wanted to communicate that I am actually some kind of person that I’m not. I’ve NEVER falsified my degrees or fields of study or expertise, even as Crip Dyke, much less as a human person doing professional work. And there’s NO FUCKING WAY I would let someone ascribe to me degrees or even self-taught expertise where I don’t have it. You just don’t do that.
And fuck if any author’s bio gets out there without the author knowing exactly what it says. She’s lying like a rug.
If she feels she’s a high profile figure that needs to fudge some things for safety or privacy reasons, more power to her. This can be a dangerous and fucked up world. But this is not that. Seriously. I think that holding yourself out as a clinical psychologist is as bad as or worse than pretending you’re a lawyer when you’re not.
@Bina that link leads to a home improvement website.
@gijoel:
Better link to the video (this one includes the time stamp) here.
Fixed link to the edit thread to which Bina intended to connect us is here.
I would like to apologize to everyone for misleading people into thinking I was a qualified clinical psychologist. I have no such qualifications and should only claim authority on topics that I actually have put in the work to understand.
Because I am actually an expert physicist and would like to assure everyone that the earth is totally flat! It only looks round because of an optical illusion caused by being to mean to the poor widdle pedophiles! And if we were just nicer to them this would release massive amounts of quantum energy, enough to power perpetual motion machines and faster then light travel, solving all of humanities problems. Trust me I know what I’m talking about I’m a scientist.
@tim gueguen
She probably didn’t because IIRC in most countries outside North America there are much more stringent laws about such things.
Times like this, I really feel for my mom. She’s a PhD child psychologist (like with a real degree from a real university) and has practiced for almost 40 years now along with doing work for the Ontario College of Psychologists.
Then to see charlatans like this and Stefan Molyneux parading around… just damages the profession.
My favorite detail from that article:
I don’t know quite why it makes me laugh so much, but it does.
@Rabid Rabbit:
When I got my Masters of Applied Sciences (a.k.a. Engineering) degree back in 1993, I think I had to get five copies made. One for me, one for my supervisor, one for the Department library, one for the University library, and one to be scanned to microfiche for the National Archives of Canada.
Nowadays that’s all done electronically, of course. But the point is that I would expect there to be multiple copies of the original thesis around to look up, even if you had to go through paper records. I can’t imagine Australia is all that different from Canada on that sort of thing. I can look up my name online at Libraries and Archives Canada and have the title of my thesis show up.
(Based on the article, I presume that she actually did finish her qualifications, it’s just that the University got sloppy in their filing somewhere.)
@Jenora Feuer
If we can’t find the thesis, what evidence do we have that she even did one? Knowing her willingness to lie about qualifications it seems within the realm of possibility that she would make this up.
Thanks Crip Dyke
And now there are calls for Betina’s AM to be stripped from her.
@gijoel
I’d be in favor of taking her honor. She clearly has no honor and deserves none.