Post-Feminist Australia

First Troy Buswell's bizarre chair-sniffing incident and now Sam Newman fondling a lingerie clad mannequin with a picture of Football journalist, Caroline Wilson's face attached to its head. In some quarters there has been a suggestion that, despite how tough it is being a female journalist in the football world that she should 'just get over it'. Troy Buswell doesn't seem able to 'just get over it' although he won't stand down as Liberal Party leader and although it wasn't actually him who was victimized. He seems to have been traumatized by victimizing someone else. According the The Age:

Tears in his eyes, Mr Buswell said he needed a short break, turned his

back and then asked his press secretary to bring him a glass of water.
Mr Buswell said his wife was aware of the allegations before they were published

on Sunday. He said it had been a difficult time for him "on a personal level".
"These are difficult issues for me to deal with and they are very difficult issues

for my family to deal with," he said. "It's hard dealing with these matters and

having to face up to your responsibilities behaviourally, publicly, and it's

harder to do it privately."

Is it hard? Really? All we're asking of him is that he not snap female MPs bra straps as he did a couple of years ago and that he not publicly sniff chairs in which female members of his own party have been sitting.

I am genuinely perplexed by his comments - perhaps he also does these things when he has people round to dinner? Perhaps he does such things to his mother? Or this mates? If he doesn't, then why would he do it in this circumstance?

In the cases of both Buswell and Newman, there has been an attempt to down play it as a joke. But the point is that in both cases these men tried to embarrass women in their profession, tried to make them feel awkward and excluded. In both cases, aside from the sexual harassment aspect, it was a very nasty insult.

One letter to the Editor attempted to cast this as a civil liberties issue, but given that we have defamation laws and no one thinks that that's the kind of censorship which, as the letter-writer put it 'has no place in a liberal democracy', I think we can put his letter down to his weak grasp of what constitutes censorship in the first place.

What is really lovely about the public response to both these incidents is that the vast majority of people have been outraged. Men, in particular, have been vocal about how embarrassed they feel that there are still men out there that behave like this and how offended they are about this kind of behaviour generally.

That's what this comes down to; it's not a women's issue, it's a human issue. It happened to women because in both cases the women work in professions in which they are in the minority, but it is nothing more than the bullying, excluding and victimizing of people who were already at a disadvantage. Gender clouds the issue, if not for that, there would be unanimous support for the women; all Australians step in if they see that someone isn't getting a fair go.