Prudish Nation: reviews and news
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ArtsHub, 22 August 2023: Book review: Prudish Nation, Paul Dalgarno
Prudish Nation journeys through diverse perspectives to explore unconventional terrain, adding invaluable voices to an ongoing cultural conversation.
This brilliant book is a must-read for people of all sexualities, genders and lifestyles. It will resonate most with those whose own stories remain over-judged and under-told.
Readings, 30 May 2023: Prudish Nation review
Relationships, sexuality, gender, identity, and how these are experienced, conceptualised and connect – or don’t – are all explored through frank personal reflections and social history, as are some of the limitations and issues people encounter when these aspects of individual existence must interact with the institutions and bureaucracy of everyday Australian life. Dalgarno explicitly addresses his privilege; he and his interview subjects are at times optimistic, resigned, and frustrated by their experiences and observations of what it is like to be in a relationship even vaguely outside the perceived ‘norm’, or when elements of their identity are contrary to others’ expectations.
ANZ LitLovers, 10 June 2023: Prudish Nation review
Prudish Nation is a really interesting book which is rich in information. It taught me about many things that I’d never really thought about, but I’m going to confine myself to just one aspect of one chapter to illustrate why it’s a book that most of us should read.
Inside Story, 6 June 2023: Baked into our bricks
Melbourne-based Dalgarno is an engaging narrator, with obvious gifts for establishing rapport and capturing a nuanced sense of a person and their circumstances. It helps that some of the people he talks to, like writer Rochelle Siemienowicz, are friends, but Dalgarno also has some personal understanding of how sexual and gender minorities are often reduced to caricatures or identity categories even in the most well-intentioned commentary.
The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 June 2023: Prudish Nation review
The question of whether we are a prudish nation is largely examined here through the prism of non-monogamy. But Dalgarno, a polyamorist, casts his net far wider than that. He interviewed more than 30 writers with varying shades of sexuality and the result is a kind of snapshot of unconventional sex lives today and his interviewees’ search for a place in what Dennis Altman calls “a couple culture”.
Sydney Morning Herald, 11 JUNE 2023: ‘By 13, I’d lost my virginity’: Author Paul Dalgarno reflects on his Aberdonian childhood
Teenagerdom can feel horrendous, if not for everyone then for lots of us. For me, it did. Aged 12, I was presented with an award for “best all-round boy” at my primary school in Aberdeen, Scotland. From an adult perspective, the school and its surrounds were rough as guts – a granite building stitched like a scab onto one of the city’s most wounded neighbourhoods, where families flapped like fish on the poverty line and more than half the kids went hungry.
Mamamia, 21 June 2023: 'I live with my wife, our kids - and my partner. The questions are unrelenting.'
The most recent Australian Census, on August 10, 2021, came with a warm assurance that, beyond the raw data, 'every stat tells a story'.
As Andrew Henderson, Census Executive Director and National Spokesperson, said at the time: 'No community is too small to count. We want to make sure everyone is represented so we're urging people to complete now.'
I needed little prompting – filling out online forms during Melbourne's interminable-feeling lockdowns constituted a decent night's entertainment. My bigger concern was how to tell my story within the options provided. It wasn't going well.
ABC Life Matters, 6 June 2023: How Australia became a prudish nation, and why that should change
So what made Australia so prudish? And how do we take a more live and let live approach to other people's sex lives?
Polyamorous author Paul Dalgarno has experienced that prudish judgement first-hand, and explores its harsh impacts in his new book Prudish Nation.
About the Book:
From its early settler days and Federation to the extreme literary censorship of the 20th century, from the 2017 Marriage Amendment Act to present-day morality and identity politics, it’s tempting to ask: is ‘fun-loving, laid-back’ Australia actually a bit, well, prudish?
Interviewing more than 30 Australia-based authors and thinkers while examining his own journey towards being openly non-monogamous, Poly author Paul Dalgarno pulls together social history and illuminating first-hand accounts of what it means to have ‘unconventional’ relationships – with others and even with ourselves – in 21st-century Australia.
Do authors such as Christos Tsiolkas, Dennis Altman and Andrea Goldsmith think we’re more tolerant than we once were? Are writers such as Lee Kofman, Rochelle Siemienowicz and Jinghua Qian optimistic about the future? Do terms such as LGBTQIA+ help or hinder meaningful progress? How does transitioning now compare to transitioning in the 1990s? How does ‘queerness’ affect notions of parenthood? Do therapists and psychologists still operate from a straight-white-male perspective and how can new practitioners such as popular psychologist and author Chris Cheers change that?
Entertaining, insightful, funny and thought-provoking, Prudish Nation adjusts the country’s bedside lamp to show us a little more clearly who and what we really are.