WARNING: this post contains images of shellfish and flowers that some readers may find confronting
I’m not at all disturbed by the disgraced Peter Slipper likening my lady bits to a shellfish, in one of many private text messages sent to his then new friend James Ashby.
For a start, as I have often said, one overlooks the insult (if indeed we confer on this text message the status of insult) on considering the source, and chooses not to waste one’s time and energy getting exercised about it.
Secondly, the comment is hardly original. Women’s genitals have been likened to fish of one kind or another many times before. Does anyone recall that scene in Bliss, the Peter Carey novel turned film, in which sardines cascade from Bettina Joy’s vagina? Yes. Well. Is it a boy thing?
For myself, I’m more inclined towards the Georgia O’Keeffe visual analogies such as this one:
But hey, whatever floats your fishing boat.
On the other hand, I find Opposition leader Tony Abbott’s comments on women profoundly disturbing. For example:
It would be folly to expect that women would ever approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, their abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons.
Or:
The problem with the Australian practice of abortion is that an objectively grave matter has been reduced to a question of the mother’s convenience… Even those who think that abortion is a woman’s right should be troubled by the fact that 100,000 Australian women choose to destroy their unborn babies every year… When it comes to lobbying local politicians, there seems to be far more interest in the treatment of boat people, which is not morally black and white, than in the question of abortion, which is.
Why anyone would spend five minutes of their time worrying about how immature men describe female genitalia when we have an aspiring Prime Minister who thinks like this about women, is a mystery to me.
Then there is the semantic quarrel about the difference between sexism and misogyny. You don’t have to hate women to be sexist, apparently, but you do have to hate us to be a misogynist. Why do I not feel consoled by this distinction?
And let’s not forget hatred can take many forms. It does not have to be overt. It adapts itself readily to many guises. If I am treated as inferior because of my sex, as Mr Abbott suggests, am I to feel better about this if it is described to me as sexism rather than misogyny? Surely sexism is an expression of misogyny?
Tony Abbott has three daughters. He feels their virginity is their most precious gift. He reduces his daughters to a hymen, a reduction I would argue denies them their full humanity, as so many of Abbott’s statements about women deny us our full humanity.
What we need to ask is do we want a Prime Minister whose default position is to deny women our full humanity?
And why would he want to do this if he doesn’t hate us, however well that hatred may be disguised?
No Place For Sheep 
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