Another man in the media who has an abiding fascination with me and everything I do is Ray Hadley, a shock jock from radio station 2GB. In one four-minute segment, he called me ‘a dingbat’, ‘as mad as a meat axe’, ‘as silly as a cut snake’, ‘a dolt’, ‘a silly, silly woman’ and, for some reason, said that I wear ‘a cannabis frock with no stockings on’. His all-too-regular tirades are broadcast nationwide and come as no surprise to anyone anymore. That’s because Hadley and his mates drone on and on like that, from their bully pulpits—‘stupid girl’ this, ‘silly woman’ that—in an attempt to ridicule and whip up public hatred against me, day in and day out.
Hadley regularly invites the home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, on his program, so that they can have a good old-fashioned blokey chat about how much of a silly little girl I am. They play sexist songs about me and guffaw like schoolboys, slapping each other on the back as they make disparaging comments. It’s unbecoming for the two of them, especially for the federal minister involved in this, but the listeners love it, so the show goes on and on and on.
There are countless more examples of things of this nature: such as the time a national lads’ magazine photoshopped my head onto a bikini model’s body to try to bully me into posing semi-naked for them. I don’t mention these insults to elicit sympathy. Instead, I raise them to illustrate a broader social problem, of which these examples are just a symptom. The reality is that this is the sort of treatment you can expect if you’re an outspoken woman at the intersection of Australian media and politics in 2018—and it’s a bloody shame.
These broadcasters and columnists to which I’ve been referring do, from time to time, attack men as well. They then use that fact to attempt somehow to prove that they aren’t sexist. The undeniable truth, though, is that they save their most personal, vicious and hateful treatment for women. Sometimes it’s Julia Gillard and sometimes it’s Yassmin Abdel-Magied. Sometimes it’s Gillian Triggs and sometimes it’s me. Always, though, it’s a woman.
And it’s this specific, maniacal hatred they reserve for women that reveals these blokes as the sexists they are.
Slut
From Cleopatra to Mary Magdalene, Hester Prynne to Rachel Jackson, and Anne Boleyn to Monica Lewinsky, history and fiction are replete with women shamed, brought down and diminished because of a phenomenon we’ve only recently started to name, but with which women have been grappling for millennia: Slut-shaming.
Many women know what it is like to have nasty rumours and sexist gossip used against them, inside and outside of politics, but very few have been prepared to call it what it is.
This is partly because the word itself is confronting and is routinely written off as resulting from feminist hysteria. Even within feminist discourse and among feminist activists it is a loaded phrase with complicated and contested meanings.
In its simplest form, it is the shaming of someone due to their sexual behaviour—real, imagined or made up. Whether it’s done via rumours, slurs or innuendo, and whether it’s whispered or shouted, the effect is the same. This kind of shaming is almost exclusively reserved for women and, like most forms of sexism, is about power and control. It keeps women in rigid behavioural controls, and can be deployed to bring us down for reasons that have nothing to do with sex.
The real reason, though, that women struggle to name what is happening to them is not because we don’t know what to call it but because the great power of slut-shaming as a weapon is that it is intrinsically self-concealing. We don’t name it, because naming it makes the ‘slut’ part true in many people’s minds. This works both to bully and intimidate women to stop them from stepping out of line and to silence powerfully any complaint about its use. Slut-shaming works because admitting you are being smeared with sexual innuendo can be the greatest shame of all. And the consequence of speaking out is the spreading of more innuendo.
In my own experience, male colleagues have used it as a weapon to play with my head, put me off my game and shut me up. Other times, it’s been deployed to ridicule me in front of my peers, undermining my credibility while I do my job. One day, a government senator, well known for his sexist remarks, yelled out in the middle of question time, ‘There goes the Green Kardashian.’ as I walked over to greet members of the Afghan embassy who were visiting the parliament. Kim Kardashian has been routinely slut-shamed, so much so that her name is now synonymous with the insult. There I was, paying my regards to our visitors and a fellow senator had effectively called me a cheap slut as I was shaking their hands. I felt humiliated.
Despite our reluctance to name it, slut-shaming happens so much that it is normalised to the point where, often, only the victim knows it has occurred. Others around them are seemingly unaware of the crippling effect of such comments, rumours and taunts on the woman’s confidence and ability to keep going, her head held high, pretending nothing has happened.
Women know that to acknowledge they have been victims of sexual slurs and rumour is to bear the brunt of them. The consequence of speaking out is more shame and the spreading of more innuendo. It is a horrible dilemma. Divorced women and single mothers are particularly vulnerable to slut-shaming. Without a male ‘protector’ as a barrier, it is easy for rumours of promiscuity to be made up, spread and believed. Single mothers have often been characterised in fiction as ‘loose’ women, dangerous to ‘wandering’ men, The Scarlet Letter being a case in point.
Feminists have spent decades pushing the boundaries of socially ‘acceptable’ behaviour for women. One of the biggest dividends of their efforts has been our increasing autonomy over our own bodies. It would be easy to understand slut-shaming as a response to this newfound freedom but, in reality, our greater sense of freedom gave us the ability to begin to share our experiences with one another; to realise these kinds of attacks weren’t right, they weren’t rare and they weren’t one-off experiences. That has been the real power of the feminist movement—allowing women to talk to one another about their experiences and then organise to change what happens to them.
Before my critics accuse me of being a ‘feminazi’ or a wowser, let me be the first to say that slut-shaming and harassment are not the same as flirting with or showing a person affection. It is designed to hurt or punish, while flirting, on the other hand, is fun.
There’s a Coalition senator who calls me ‘babe’, and ‘Ser-bear’, a name friends at high school called me that was, and is, endearing. It’s friendly, it’s affectionate, and his use of it has never been demeaning or predatory. Mature adults know the difference between being friendly and flirting, and the difference between flirting and sexist put-downs. This isn’t actually hard; it’s called civility. Women can instantly tell the difference between a sleaze and a gentlemen. Decent men can too.
In the case of Cleopatra, and other historic figures, their power, intellect and political cunning are diminished as their legacies are reduced to speculation about their sexual relationships. Diminishing these legacies adds to the normalisation of men being the only real leaders and erases women’s history. In the case of Mary Magdalene and Monica Lewinsky, we see clearly the different standards applied to men and women, where, for one gender, sexual relationships are viewed as heroic conquests or, at least, titillating, excusable foibles; and, for the other, they can be life destroying.
The power of slut-shaming has long been its ability to hide in plain sight while demanding the silence of its victims. When something doesn’t have a name, it’s very hard to talk about and to resist.
Calling out slut-shaming is still a momentous and perilous task, and not everyone who has experienced its chilling effect is able to speak up. Those of us in the privileged position to do so can and should. Naming it breaks the silence it creates and calling it out breaks its power.
Nursery rhymes
The last week of parliament at the end of the year is always chaotic. There’s a mad rush by the government to get legislation passed before everyone heads off on their summer holidays, with
festive functions and last-minute negotiations frantically squeezed into the late-night sittings.
The last day is renowned for running into the early hours of the next morning, with debates over amendments. In one of these late-night sessions, in 2014, I was on my feet, debating a bill I had fought for months to stop. It was the Abbott government’s policy of Temporary Protection Visas. It was designed to stop anyone getting permanent protection, residency or citizenship if they had arrived in Australia by boat, even if they were found to be legitimate refugees. Essentially, it was creating a lifetime of limbo for thousands of asylum-seeker families.
The debate had been going for hours, the government not having secured the numbers from the Senate crossbench until well into the evening. I was trying to amend the bill to put some safeguards and review mechanisms in place to stop refugee children, in particular, being classed as ‘illegals’ for the rest of their lives. Most senators weren’t participating in the debate, so would come and go from the chamber only when the bells would ring for a vote. Being the last night of the year, there were several Christmas parties and functions on in the building.
I had been in the chamber all night. As I was on my feet, arguing my points, a fellow senator walked into the chamber and started interjecting. He was yelling various things, none of them related to the amendment being debated. ‘No one likes you, Sarah,’ he sniggered at me from a nearby chair. He was being rude and obnoxious, trying to throw me off my game. I called on the chair to intervene and the senator was called to order. ‘Senator Bernardi, you are not in your place. You should not be interjecting in any case, but it is even more disorderly to be doing it from where you are.’
I later discovered the Liberals were hosting drinks for their party members in the lounge right next to the chamber.
Over the next hour, despite being asked to stop, Senator Bernardi continued to walk in and out of the chamber, often just to heckle me. He would repeatedly distract me, and then walk out when the chair called him to order. It became increasingly apparent that he was enjoying himself.
He kept moving around the chamber, getting closer and closer to my seat, until he was sitting on the bench next to mine. As I stood, arguing my position on the current clause of the legislation, Senator Bernadi, who was still a member of the Liberal Party at the time, started singing nursery rhymes in my ear. He was leaning in, close to me, singing his songs, almost in a whisper.
He then said the name of a man he insinuated I had slept with.
Again, he did all of this while I was on my feet, speaking. It was creepy and I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t want to draw attention to it because that seemed even more embarrassing, and the last thing I wanted was to bring more focus to the rumours he was spreading. I tried hard to pretend I wasn’t listening. I kept speaking to the almost empty chamber about the very serious legislation we were supposed to be debating. He got louder, wanting me to react and, finally, I did.
‘Sometimes I wonder whether we should have breathalysers at the doors in this place,’ I said to the chair.
‘Senator Hanson-Young, resume your seat. There is no requirement for that. Senator Bernardi, I would ask you to remain quiet—silent, in fact.’ I continued my speech about the amendment but the Hansard record shows that Senator Bernardi went on to interrupt me several more times before the night ended, taking no heed of the chair’s warning.
Sometime past midnight, the government’s legislation passed, without the amendment. I went home, exhausted and saddened that I couldn’t stop what I knew was a bad policy. But I was also upset at myself. I knew I should have called out what had happened in the chamber, but instead I had stayed silent. It was because I didn’t want to show weakness. I didn’t want to be shamed.
For weeks after that, what had happened played on my mind. Should I have insisted Senator Bernardi be thrown out? Why was his obnoxious behaviour my fault? What was I afraid of? Anyone watching in the chamber that night must have seen what he was doing, but no one leapt to my defence. Why? Did they, like me, think that by ignoring him, he’d eventually grow bored and give up? Do bullies ever really grow bored, or are they always having too much fun bullying for that?
Little did I know, I wasn’t the only one who had been thinking about what had happened. A week before parliament was to resume, in February, then senator Glenn Lazarus called for a zero-alcohol policy and breath testing of all politicians before they were allowed to vote on legislation. In an interview with ABC Radio in Brisbane, Senator Lazarus told listeners that he had witnessed me being ‘abused’ in the Senate after a late-night sitting where fellow senators had been drinking. Senator Lazarus left the Senate in July 2016, three years earlier than expected, after losing his seat to Pauline Hanson in Malcolm Turnbull’s disastrous double-dissolution election.
In August 2018 Pauline Hanson voted against the Senate’s censure of Senator Leyonhjelm over his sexist behaviour towards me. She supported his disgraceful comments and voted to protect him, but, in the end, the censure passed, by just one vote. I wonder what Glenn Lazarus would have done if he was still there. My gut says he would have voted for decency, and respect, both for his female colleagues and for the parliament itself.
Oldest trick in the book
Sexist slurs and rumours have been used to undermine women in the parliament for as long as women have been there. Long before women were even allowed to be elected and sit in the parliament, some were said to have only got their job in a male politician’s office because they were either having sex with him or he fancied having sex with her. Today, female journalists up in the press gallery still battle the rumour mill that serves to undermine them and their craft. Women journalists tell me about the frustration of knowing that delivering a news scoop will often be followed by whispers that the only way they got the story was because they ‘must have’ flirted with the particular minister.
For Labor MP Emma Husar, what started as a complaint from a disgruntled former staffer over how she ran her office quickly turned into a smutty public campaign to discredit her. I don’t pretend to know all the ins and outs of what happened, but what is clear and on the public record paints a disturbing picture of a successful, smart woman brought down by smut and smears.
The role the media played in this campaign was lethal. What had previously been rumour and innuendo in the halls and offices of parliament, used internally to intimidate her, was soon used to slaughter her public reputation.
The member for Lindsay was accused of poor staff management, with complaints about the types of tasks her staff had been asked to do. She also brought her autistic son’s dog into the office at times. The New South Wales Labor Party was investigating the complaints and a review had been commissioned. Newspapers and other media outlets had been tipped off that an investigation was underway, but that wasn’t enough to really tarnish her political reputation. So, beyond staff-management issues and questions of her use of parliamentary entitlements, claims of sexualised behaviour, and even of staff members bearing witness to their boss ‘flirting’, were leaked to the press. The most lewd of all the allegations was that this single mother of three kids had exposed herself, Basic Instinct style, to a fellow MP while in his office. Both Husar and the named MP, Jason Clare, refuted the claims immediately, but they were still published. And, as with all hot media stories and clickbait, the refuted claims were republished, and republished, and republished, by media outlets across the country. The damage was done.
Those of us in political circles knew instantly that the first-term MP from Sydney could not come back from this. There were too many lingering questions about where the line of truth was. The insinuation was clear—if she couldn’t manage to keep her underpants on or legs closed, how would she be any good at managing her office? The clear insinuation was she was not fit to be an MP. ‘It doesn’t matter that it’s not true, she can’t survive this,’ one seasoned Canberra MP said, summing up how so many people saw it.
It wasn’t just politica
l opponents from the other side of the chamber saying these things; the chatter in the Labor Party was unstoppable. Labor heavyweights, inside and outside the parliament, made it clear she would have to step aside. The Labor people I spoke to at the time just shook their heads, knowing how unfair but inevitable it all was. As they were more worried about shutting down the negative press than protecting one of their own from public humiliation, murmurs of a preselection challenge started to spread. It was clear Husar would not be able to stay on the team beyond the next election. While the public commentary was that ‘She needs to do what’s right for her and her family’, the internal message was clear: ‘She needed to do the right thing by the party’, which was to fall on her sword.
A week later, the report of the internal investigation was handed down. It found there was no reason for the MP to resign, and that there was little basis for the complaints. But Husar, who had endured weeks of public shaming due to the deliberate leaking of lewd sexualised rumours, had already announced she was quitting politics.
Was Emma Husar slut-shamed? Yes, she was. Brutally, publicly, and with the ultimate price being her political career.
Husar’s treatment both by parts of the media and individuals within her own party has been disgusting, and was nothing more than sexualised insults designed to destroy her credibility in the age-old way. Tragically, in her case, it worked. Her short time as a young, female politician is over, before she had even got a chance to recontest the election. Her career destroyed. And all for what? Because a man who didn’t get along with his female boss thought spreading rumours about her going sans underwear was fair? Or because she dared to tell a bloke who worked in her office he wasn’t up to the job? She upset the sense of entitlement of the Labor boys’ club and was punished, in full sight.
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