In a heated exchange on the ABC's Q&A program on Monday, media personality Steve Price told Guardian columnist Van Badham she was being "hysterical" in her response to a question about domestic violence.
Audience member Tarang Chawla told the panel his 23-year-old sister had been stabbed to death with a meat cleaver by her male partner last year.
Referencing Eddie McGuire's recent "joke" about drowning journalist Caroline Wilson, Chawla asked how politicians and the media will bring about a cultural shift in how we talk about violence against women.
Price was unimpressed by the reference.
"If you listen to that broadcast in context, it was a bunch of blokes laughing about things they shouldn't have laughed about," he said. "I think far too much was then made of it."
Van Badham then took Price to task for dismissing the comments as "jokes between blokes", prompting an exchange in which Price became increasingly defensive.
PRICE: "Don't tar me with their brush, please."
BADHAM: "Steve, do you know what you're doing? Do you have any understanding what you're doing, in this man has given us an extremely upsetting story about what happened and you are defending yourself in the context where we have to have a conversation about cultural attitudes that treat women differently and you cannot create paradigms where there are blokes–"
PRICE: "Don't want you to twist stories where you shouldn't. Just because you're a woman, you're not the only one who can get upset. Men can be just as upset."
BADHAM: "We have to stop creating these binary men are this, women are this, masculinity is this, femininity is this, men have high status, women have low status, we can make jokes and it's all jokes and, yeah, they apologised and that's fine but on the receiving end is the ludicrous proportion of women who do endure violence."
"I think you're just being hysterical," Price said.
