I'm more than a tad tired of all that nonsense about Oz Prime Minister Julia Gillard being an unmarried, childless and godless sheila, so I was glad when Crikey's Bernard Keane took a scalpel to the mainstream media:"The growing media obsession with both Julia Gillard's physical appearance and her marital status could be dismissed as indicative of both the essential inanity of the press and its casual sexism. That's certainly enough as it is. The media subjects female politicians to a blatant double standard, requiring them to conform to standards on physical presentation and lifestyle choices that are never applied to men. Moreover, it's not as if the media perpetuates a single stereotype to which female politicians must conform. Instead, it's a constantly changing set of requirements that means there's always something to criticise and the media always wins. Look too good, you're condemned as vacuous, or reliant on your appearance. Don't look good enough, you're disparaged as unattractive. Don't have a family, you're deliberately barren. Have a family, you're a career-obsessed harridan neglecting your kids. But it's more than that. The Australian yesterday launched a series of personal attacks on the Prime Minister, with the clear aim of ridiculing her and delegitimising her as a political figure. It complements an effort by Liberal Party figures to attack Gillard over her childlessness and her de facto marital status."
Go read the rest (with links to Albrechtsen, Stewart & Legge's sly nastiness) here.
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