There's little sexism in media reporting of the Prime Minister, but a definite sexist edge to some of the public abuse of her
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Julia Gillard has not herself been complaining of sexist treatment by the media, although a number have on her account. Publicly, she is philosophical and stoic about criticism and does not complain, even as she expresses some bemusement about the expectations people have about her.
''If we look across Australia's political history, when Bob Hawke was there, or Paul Keating was there, I don't recall there being constant demands for them to show more personality,'' she told Mike Willesee on Sunday night.
''I don't remember people looking at John Howard and saying: 'Gee, I wish he'd be warmer and cuddlier and more humorous and more engaging in his press conferences.'
''They looked at him and said, 'Well, he's the bloke running the country' and I think the same standard should apply to me.
''I'm a woman running the country. I don't ask people to come to the view that they want to have me around to dinner on Sunday night, that's not what I am here to do. What I try to do are some tough things, some hard things that make a difference.''
Asked if it would be easier if she were a man, she said that she grew up watching Australian prime ministers, and, had she been asked to imagine a prime minister, she would have imagined a ''bloke in a suit. Now I'm the first person to not be a bloke in that suit ... It's a different image of leadership. So I'm not surprised that it's taking a bit of time for that to settle down.''
Bob Brown, leader of the Greens, was the person this week who accused the media of, perhaps unintentional sexism, in writing about Gillard, but he is far from the first. I have myself been accused by readers sympathetic to Labor on having more than a soupcon of extra bile because she is a woman, and while I have examined my conscience and declared myself innocent I try to keep my ear attuned for sexist nuances coming from elsewhere.
It seems to me that the political media is generally free of overt sexism. When one sees differential treatment in the media, it is in part because she has been using her feminity as a weapon as, of course, she is entitled. But even when she is camping it up a little, she gives and gets little more than John Howard did when wearing Wallabies jumpers, or Kevin Rudd did in playing devout parishioner, or Keating playing Albert Speer.
But there's a definite sexist streak in some of the public displays of disaffection, particularly, it seems to me, from women. Slightly more women than men may like Gillard, but if there is a group of women who rejoices in a woman being prime minister, or in this woman being prime minister, there is another set whose hatred and anger at her seem visceral, encapsulated by the expressions on the faces of women carrying ''Ditch the bitch'' signs.
Those furious expressions bear some relationship to the faces on American Tea Party protesters, and, I expect, there is little reasoning with them. Perhaps more people will settle down to Gillard as prime minister - if she has any time left - but she is doomed to wonder what she has done to inspire such vituperation from a distance. (I can think of a number of others in politics, in both parties, and of both sexes, who have done more, even in alleged treachery, to ''earn'' such dislike.)
But a different, even hostile, reception, is not to be public incapacity to cope with a female leader. We have lots of them in all fields, even politics, and seem to cope. Nor is it a matter of ''girly'' rather than blokey personality, or for that matter, feminist rather than feminine presentation.
Australia has had 12 prime ministers during Gillard's lifetime; Menzies, Holt, McEwen, Gorton, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating, Howard and Rudd, as well as herself, and that it would be hard to find many characteristics - even supposedly masculine ones - which they had in common, or even in common with any other.
Yet, whether they knew them personally or not, most Australians, depending on their age, had mental images of them as personalities, characters, people who stood for or represented different values, and as people with foibles and quirks as much as strengths. All, as with Gillard, lived in partisan eras, where politics was often bitter and personal.
There were spin doctors, image consultants, sometimes voice coaches and even hair stylists who worked on trying to craft the mental image voters had of each of these leaders, but few, if any, succeeded in leaving an impression much different from the basic personality that they were.
There is no model for a successful political personality, and if there are characteristics (for example memory, gregariousness and moral character) which predispose for success, there is little evidence that they are unequally distributed across gender lines. One must make the best of what one is and has. As a general rule, it is more dangerous politically pretending to be something or someone one is not than in being oneself, warts and all.
John Howard, who had a superb political mind but who was not, on the face of it, greatly gifted with natural political assets, put a good deal of emphasis on the fact that by the time he had become prime minister, people ''knew him''. They knew what sort of a person he was, and they knew a good deal about his instincts. Indeed, they almost invariably knew more about his base values and personal predispositions than they did about his policies at any one time - a reason why the electorate (as opposed to the Labor Party) was never too literal in coping with his broken promises. Howard took a good deal more case to be true to his image than to his platform, a reason why he seemed, to many, reassuring, unassuming, decent, and unlikely to do anything erratic or likely to frighten the horses.
Howard, indeed, was able to juxtapose a certain bland safeness and ordinariness against the scariness of a Mark Latham, just as, a decade before, Paul Keating, an entirely different personality from Howard, had successfully portrayed John Hewson as the ''feral abacus'', a Dr Frankenstein wanting to perform unspeakable experiments on the Australian body politic.
No one could portray Julia Gillard as intrinsically scary. I am amazed at the Opposition's success in portraying her as a ''liar''. (Gillard deserves what she gets for going back on a campaign promise, but if a Jesuit-trained Opposition leader could, or should, fairly describe such conduct as a lie, it is no wonder he left the seminary.)
Many have never forgiven Gillard for the way she took power from Kevin Rudd. That's her ''legitimacy'' problem. The alleged plot, of course, involves ambush, ingratitude and personal betrayal, allegedly on the score of ambition rather than duty. Perhaps, to mix Shakespearean metaphors, there is an element of the Iago in the Lady Macbeth scenario from the suggestion that Rudd toppled, in part, by following her advice about dumping proposals for an emissions trading scheme.
But even admirers of Howard knew him to be a Machiavellian plotter, and, even by exaggerated accounts, Gillard could hardly be said to have been as brutal an assassin as Fraser, Hawke, Keating or, possibly even McMahon. Indeed Harold MacMillan said successful politicians have to persuade voters that they can wield the knife before they are trusted with power.
The problem is that voters still do not know. Or, that what they think they know, they do not like much, or at least have never definitely warmed to. One especial difficulty, I expect, is with the ''real'' and ''fake'' Julia issue; the sense the manners and the grooming are for the occasion, the words scripted, the sincerity faked. A prime minister is, after all, like a relative. They can be mad uncles - or aunts. Hard, perhaps exasperating, to deal with sometimes. But there regardless. However perfect their manners, you have an instinct for what they really think. It might be sexist to ask her to show a bit of leg. It's not to ask her to show a bit of personality.
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