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May 13, 2007
We still live with the old madonna-whore cultural code , a black-and-white mentality that paints women as either motherly saints or impure prostitutes. The gender code says "take your pick: you can either be Mother Teresa, or Paris Hilton. Don't try anything else that makes us nervous".
Matt Davidson
As Meg Mundell observes
Women in the public eye are caricatured into one of three cliches: the Freaky She-man, scorned for not being feminine or pretty enough — her armpits are too hairy, her clothes too frumpy, her eggs too unfertilised; the Good Mother, who must tone down her sexuality or risk the venom of colleagues and commentators — and don't even think about breastfeeding in parliament; or the Hot Babe whose success is due to her looks, so shouldn't be taken seriously.
She observes that Julie Gillard doesn't dress like a Hilton, but nor does she seem hell-bent on becoming a mother, symbolic or otherwise. So what is wrong with this woman?
Mundell says that this kind of reaction:
...is a deep anxiety about power, and who is permitted to hold it. Some delicate souls remain freaked out by the idea of women being leaders. ... Politicians and fruit-bowlers have a handy fall-back position: if a female adversary is rising too high in the political pecking order, they just throw another hoop for her to jump through — childlessness, hairstyle, dress sense, love life. Set up enough obstacles and she might lose focus and stumble — or better still, accidentally flash her knickers, the wanton hussy!
We also have underlying paranoia and prejudice from the cultural conservatives who continue to think of white Australia in terms of a a breed-or-perish dictum because saying low birth rates and high immigration could trigger social dislocation and violence.
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Missing from that is power as sex. Many powerful women are perceived as more attractive because of their power; female political figures fall into that category.