"It is a story for our times. The amateur DVD boasting the exploits of the self-described ‘teenage kings' of Werribee looked like any other. It had an R rating on the cover. The credits listed its ‘stars': ‘Boofa', ‘Choco', Brendan and the rest. In a homely note, it thanked one boy's mother for the use of her video camera. What the DVD contained, however, horrified a nation: the abuse, sexual humiliation and degradation of a 16-year-old girl with a mild intellectual disability."

In "Love Me Tender?", Anne Manne looks at sexual liberalism in the age of pornography. Raunch culture, the pervasiveness of porn imagery, see-through clothes and "sexy pole-dancing kits" for five-year-olds, the horrifying cases of Dianne Brimble and the Werribee DVD: these suggest that the time has come, she argues, for a radical rethink of how - and at what age - we are sexualised.

"All the events are dispatches from the frontline of a much larger, deeper and ongoing cultural clash between the new regime of sexual liberalism and the great movement in the late twentieth century towards women's equality. The whole society, as Helen Garner once put it so well, is seething with issues of sex and power ... many of the contours of the new sexual liberalism remain shaped by male dominance. Every so often a truly ugly incident flashes into the public realm, bearing the harsh and indelible signature of misogyny."

"Quadrant turned 50 this month. That is a notable achievement, and it did not go unnoticed. Its golden-anniversary dinner, held in October, was apparently quite an occasion. It was not cheap to get in, but the house was full. The prime minister attended and spoke with warmth and admiration of his favourite magazine ... He praised everyone involved with the current Quadrant ... he reminded them that they were, as they had always been, a small, beleaguered but powerful force of civilisation, non-conformity and rightness ."

In "The Usual Suspects", Martin Krygier reflects on half a century of Quadrant, celebrating the magazine's history of anti-totalitarian thought, its breadth of vision, its high standard of writing - and lamenting its lapse into increasingly bilious rants against the clumsy catch-all of "political correctness", against baby boomers, against the ABC and the Canberra press gallery and academics, humanists, lawyers.

" Quadrant started in opposition to what Owen Harries and Tom Switzer call the "shallow, reflexive, progressive orthodoxy" of Australian intellectual life. Over time, having become used to being labelled, derided and dismissed for no good reason, indeed often for the worst of reasons, some Quadrant people came to adapt to the role of pariah. They came to like it, even to cultivate it. To be despised by those you despised - to be contrarian, that ugly boast-word - became a confirmation of one's rightness and courage."

"The experience of widespread loss from the epidemic cuts across borders: it is shared by gay men and drug users in large Western cities, but most significantly by millions in sub-Saharan Africa. One of my early memories of the international struggle is of the founder of Africa's first significant non-government AIDS organisation, Noreine Kaleeba, a Ugandan. Kaleeba had been discussing the devastation left in her country by Idi Amin. When she first visited San Francisco, she said, she recognised a similar experience: young people dying in large numbers, and denial among those around them."

In "The Margins of Our Attention", Dennis Altman looks back over 25 years of HIV and AIDS, recalling the early days of the Australian response to the epidemic, both in the gay community and in public-health strategies organised with the federal government. Both a memoir of a life of AIDS activism and a reflection on the successes of the nation in responding to the epidemic, it is also a reminder that AIDS is still a far greater threat to humanity than terrorism.

And in "Media Circus", David Salter gives a take-no-prisoners run-through of the media's year. The foundations of the Fourth Estate are getting wobblier, he argues, with uncertainty over technological change being masked by a grandiose approach to journalism that privileges influence and self-promotion over genuine news.

"Television, especially commercial current-affairs television, is losing whatever small sense of proportion it once possessed. Newspapers and talkback radio pursue shallow forms of populism where the assumed political centre has been nudged so far to the right of the soup spoon that any deviation from the mainstream is reflexively branded "un-Australian". The internet descends into an unnavigable swamp of blogdom and crass home videos. Vast acreages of our Fourth Estate are now an unweeded garden. Things rank and gross grow there."

In the Monthly Comment, David Marr offers his definitive word on the Jonestown saga and the "outing" of shock jock Alan Jones. How is it that the star columnists of the Murdoch and Fairfax press - those attack dogs so incensed by Chris Masters' book - even found it a revelation that Jones was gay, he asks; why is it that Jones's sexuality should be off limits to biographers; and where exactly in the biography are those much-hyped allegations of paedophilia?

" Jonestown gets into very murky territory, but makes no allegations of sexual impropriety by Jones at Kings and Brisbane Grammar ... No evidence of paedophilia is produced and no allegations are made. None. Yet the pack detected Heffernan-style claims of paedophilia in the very atmosphere of the book and accused Masters (and me) of advancing the somewhat unlikely argument that all gay men are potential paedophiles. Proof? Not needed. This is the world of Opinion..."

And in "Contra Mundum",the Desert Fathers, an arcane language and Byzantine robes meet PowerPoint presentations, slick DVDs and sequinned madonnas when Kate Holden investigates an ancient and obscure institution thriving - and modernising, albeit selectively - in suburban Australia: the Coptic Church.

"‘Cool,' says a chic young woman, Christina, when I tell her I am writing about her church. ‘We need more advertising!' The church's youth magazine is called ‘Contra Mundum' (Against the World), a severe sentiment that adheres to the determined purity of Coptic life in resistance to a licentious environment. It sits oddly with the fashionable clothes on display in the Friday night service I attend."

There's also Clive James on the importance of unhappiness in the creation of truly great art, and how that unhappiness is often cultivated; Ashley Hay on one girl's journey from a remote Northern Territory community to the big smoke, all because of a whale; and Charles Firth on the infamous US chain Hooters, which recently relaunched in Australia.

"Just like the Surrealists, Davila works with found images, which he subjects to violent cut-ups. You usually can't take in the paintings all at once: they are too large, dispersed, disjunctive. Even in the smaller works, your eye is shoved from one outrage to the next, interrupted by obscenity, then forced towards other discordant forms or colours, which are in turn interrupted."

In "Haranguing the Nation", Justin Clemens takes on the confronting and highly politicised works of Chilean-born Australian artist Juan Davila. A retrospective of Davila's art is currently touring, providing ample evidence of his technical accomplishment, his range of high- and pop-culture sources, and his commitment to shocking the viewer.

"Some artists exhaust themselves in shock; these recent paintings suggest that Davila's obvious transgressions were always dedicated to unleashing something more profound. For him, art doesn't just offer imaginary or symbolic resolutions to real problems, but is itself a practice of freedom, even if that freedom can look pretty weird or unpleasant from the outside."

And in "Some Things We Don't Yet Know", Craig Sherborne casts a critical eye over Robert Hughes's autobiography, Things I Didn't Know. Hughes is a masterful writer, he finds - by turns the tone is "surly to hot-tempered, now callous, now kindly, humble, proud, sulky, frightened, noble" - but his enjoyment of the book is curtailed by the perfunctory treatment of the suicide of Hughes's son, Danton.

" Misfortune could not have conscripted a more suitable scribe for a car accident. Who better to write the misery of such an ordeal, from the broken body it created to the bitter farce of its legal aftermath? Things I Didn't Know begins with Hughes's 1999 smash near Broome, and what a poet of near-deathness he is. He compels us to view the organs of trauma, the black blood of regret, the pink breath of hope. "

There's also Peter Craven on the best reading for summer, from memoirs and literary fiction to audio-books and a trash favourite or two; Adrian Martin on the clever interplay of chamber drama and the historical long-view in Stephen Frears' The Queen; Alan Saunders on recent food books; and Luke Davies on the finest of graphic novels, a tale of migration and the kindness of strangers: The Arrival, by Perth author Shaun Tan.