With good reason. When you tell women that they just simply won’t understand because they haven’t been born with the same equipment for understanding such lofty thoughts as how to kick, punch, gouge, trample and generally beat up another human being, then he’s got to expect a fight. Except I can’t, because I’m a woman.

But let me slow down a little.

Talking with David Foster is actually not nearly so combative, and I’ve just done exactly what he is worried will happen, which is to completely tangle up his arguments about male aggression and the martial arts – and women.

He’s in a dilemma. About Mates of Mars he says:

Just about everything I have to say on the subject of male aggression is in this novel. But I don’t want myself portrayed as some kind of legendary fighter. I don’t want to glorify things. I want to get them down as they are. There are lots of people who don’t want to fight but who are interested in martial arts. But I don’t want to talk about my interest in martial arts. It’s a sensitive issue and there’s a strong sense amongst martial artists, and amongst outsiders too, that it’s not appropriate to talk about it.

The dilemma is, then, that this book draws the conversation constantly back to the martial arts (although for me all the stuff about inner balance and codes of ethics is much less com­manding than the social satire, and the ruthless way that male identity is ridiculed). How is it that Foster’s own belief in and deeply sincere commitment to martial arts as a way of life, offering a strong alternative to the raucous anger and violence of most masculine sports, translates into such wickedly clear-eyed satire? He shrugs and looks just for a moment a little less defensive: ‘I’m a natural born debunker. I can’t help myself. When I turn my attention to any subject, that’s what results.’

But we’re soon back on to the mysteries of the martial arts, and there’s no denying that Foster’s eloquence on the subject makes a girl want to chop up bricks by the dozen. He says that he enjoys the art as a contrast to the task of writing, and he sees it as productive to involve himself in another art form in that way, a physical art, to get away from the writing. Which seems perfectly reasonable to me, and probably beats the spectator sports that a whole coterie of boy-o Australian writers engage in with noisy approbation. There’s something lean and muscular about Foster’s writing that contrasts very nicely with the flab of the spectators. But is this lean muscularity only for the men?

This is where it gets complicated and a bit confusing. There’s the book, a brilliantly funny indictment of male posturing and the destructiveness of masculine codes of behaviour: and there’s the writer defending masculine aggressivity as primal and somehow of central importance. I think they cobble together, but even if they don’t, the issues that their juxtaposition brings out are not only fascinating but timely.

Foster is perhaps tapping into a moment of turning, a moment when, finally, men are understanding that they are the ones who must examine their differences, that they are not necessarily the measuring stick of what is normal. Here’s how our conversation went:

Apparently, I don’t understand what it is like to stand eye to eye with an opponent, to measure myself physically against someone who may well be capable of beating me up. And a fine thing, too, as far as I’m concerned, so perhaps David Foster wins that round because I don’t want to get into the ring. He says it’s because the ring is not made for me. He’s right.

But the idea of aggression, even for Foster, is a tricky one:

I don’t like the word aggression because it has such negative and pejorative con­notations. I think it’s the instinct to fight and it’s a basic male instinct. The pleasure in fighting is partly spiritual and mental, not just physical. As a scientist I’m prepared to accept that the difference (while sexuality is a continuum, and this is a generalisation) is that small boys exhibit a desire to fight. I can’t see harm in that because it develops into a more aggressive attitude towards winning a living and exploring a universe, and that’s what men are for. Men are the specialised disposable sex, if you like.

The image of fields of men slogging away at each other, out of sight and out of mind, has, it is true, a certain appealing logic to it, so why don’t men do the right thing and bash each other up, instead of beating up on wives and any stray after-dark female? Foster is pessimistically pragmatic:

Unsure whether my vision was a perverse or optimistic one, I was willing to try my last assault. How is it, I wanted to know, that in Mates of Mars, for all the writer’s belief in the importance of recognising aggression as natural, and of the possibilities for control and knowledge offered by martial arts, the conclusion drawn at the end of his story is that the world as it is in no way can support the development of the positive channelling of such instincts towards an ethics. Wonderfully funny as it is, the book is savagely pessimistic.

David Foster’s answer will have to remain enigmatic for those who have not yet read this book: ‘Well’, he almost whispered, ‘there’s Sven.’

I collapsed in my chair with a shout of laughter, and rolled my eyes and slapped my thigh-not a pretty sight, but read the book, and you’ll perhaps understand my extreme reaction.

Did I come away from the bout victorious? Did I challenge the fighter and throw a few well-aimed punches? Did I duck and weave and bounce around on my toes sufficiently well to get this male off-balance?

No belts for me, I’m afraid. After all, this is the man who wrote Mates of Mars and I’m just the person who read it and loved it. No contest.