According to Wikipedia, Catherine Deveny is a comedian and columnist. It’s a shame she doesn’t make her columns amusing.

Andrew Bolt ripped into her last year as the “hateful columnist” which probably won her a medal among the left.

I think her latest piece on debutante balls was hateful, ill conceived, unfunny and inappropriate.

If it was meant to be amusing it just wasn’t.

Hundreds of thousands of Australian women have made their debuts, many of them in country towns where it’s an important tradition.

She might be right about the 19th century origins:

It was an opportunity for the affluent middle-class to eat their way up the food chain by shacking up with aristocracy, and for the aristocracy to shag the new money and stop inbreeding by slumming it with the plebs.

But times have moved on. In modern egalitarian Australia those views are simply fanciful. Deb balls teach young people how to dance and how to present themselves in formal company.

For myself in 1984 it was when I learnt to waltz (I still have two left feet) and the first time I wore a dinner suit.

It was a good learning curve for me too. I neglected my partner that night and first encountered (quite rightly) a woman’s scorn.

Deb balls are politically harmless and socially beneficial; simply part of life’s fabric, to be experienced by choice or overlooked, according to the individual.

Young women should not feel pressure from mouldy old writers to distance themselves from the experience.