All media eyes are on Sarah Hanson-Young's defamation suit against Zoo magazine over a 2012 article that included an image of the Greens senator's face photoshopped onto the body of a lingerie model.
Crikey asks what implications the case could have for The Daily Telegraph, which has recently depicted former speaker Peter Slipper as a rat and Kevin Rudd and Anthony Albanese as bumbling characters from Hogan's Heroes. Similarly, Fairfax's The Vine compares Zoo's Hanson-Young image to the Telegraph's depiction of then communications minister, Stephen Conroy, as Joseph Stalin.
While the Murdoch press' ludicrous comparisons of centrist Australian politicians to genocidal, authoritarian tyrants needs addressing (if for no other reason than they are an insult both to the intelligence of the public and the actual victims of genocide), Zoo's treatment of Hanson-Young is an altogether different beast.
The Telegraph's attacks on Labor politicians, while clearly designed to undermine Labor's chance at the polls, were ostensibly criticisms of the said politicians' policies. The Zoo image, on the other hand, was an explicitly gendered attack that had nothing to say about Hanson-Young's actual stance on asylum seeker policy. It is a classic case of sexualising a woman in order to deflect any danger of taking her seriously.
While NSW supreme court justice Lucy McCallum agreed that Zoo's image was capable of holding Hanson-Young up to public ridicule, she also struck out two of Hanson-Young's key arguments, that the image made the senator appear 'immature' and 'incompetent'. On the latter claim, at least, McCallum is wrong.
There is a quote by the 18th century writer Mary Wollstonecraft that I am fond of repeating because, more than 200 years later, it remains a truism. 'Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre,' Wollstonecraft laments, 'the mind shapes itself to the body and roaming around its gilt cage only seeks to adorn its prison.'
Throughout history, the emphasis place on women's looks has been a key factor in their exclusion from intellectual participation. It was the job of men to think, speak and act while women were merely required to look ornamental.
Clearly this is not a thing of the past, as attested by the spectacle of Tony Abbott parading his adult daughters on the campaign trail and boasting that the best reason to vote for him was his 'not bad looking daughters'.
Haven't we all heard them — those 'compliments' that imply women are to be seen and not heard? 'Don't you worry your pretty little