David Penberthy: Hanson-Young was right to fight verbal attacks
Well done Sarah Hanson-Young for standing up to verbal abuse and for showing that slurs against women too often include sex and gender, writes David Penberthy.
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At the risk of sounding like Germaine Greer – not that there’s anything wrong with that, she’s a delightfully grumpy old iconoclast who has spent her life making the world a more interesting place – the Sarah Hanson-Young story contains some unpleasant truths about the worst aspects of the behaviour of some men towards women.
I would have to admit first up that I am not a huge fan of Ms Hanson-Young, not personally obviously, but on policy grounds.
I note that last week, in keeping with the Greens’ default position, she was cravenly using the Yorketown fire as a vehicle to push her climate-change barrow, and is today urging the kiddies to take the day off school in recognition of a global climate emergency. Right on.
Further, I am not one who normally punches the air for joy at defamation payouts, being somewhat biased on account of my profession, and holding the view that people who go into public life and are afforded the power that comes with it should cop the slings and arrows that come with scrutiny.
But the defamation that was sustained by the SA Greens Senator was of a different nature. This wasn’t a case of a glass-jawed politician taking umbrage at a robust analysis piece dissecting their performance, or a piece of name-calling in the course of some on-air exchange on talkback radio.
This was a sexualised attack on her by one of her parliamentary colleagues, former Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm, that continued to be repeated outside of the chamber.
And the most bizarre and appalling thing about it, as the Federal Court found this week, was that Sarah Hanson-Young was under attack for something she had not even said.
In one of the most excruciatingly convoluted efforts in the history of our Parliament, Leyonhjelm tied himself in all sorts of knots as he tried to explain the call he issued on the Senate floor last year for Hanson-Young to “stop shagging men”.
In a press release, and in interviews afterwards, he claimed Ms Hanson-Young used words in parliament that were “tantamount” to claiming all men are rapists but “nevertheless had sexual relations with them”.
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In his eyes, this made her a hypocrite. His suggestion was that, you know, if all men were rapists, Ms Hanson-Young should boycott them in the bedroom.
Whatever warped internal logic he was driving at there was underscored by a key factual problem. She. Never. Said. It.
You could hear the clutch slipping in Leyonhjelm’s original press release, with his use of the word “tantamount”. The word “tantamount” was deployed almost hopefully, as if to suggest that, even if she didn’t say it, she effectively said it or might as well have said it.
That word “tantamount” was in reality an admission by Leyonhjelm that she had not used those words. It was a lame attempt to inject some ballast into his argument, and possibly to shield himself from future action for defamation.
It didn’t work.
I don’t know Hanson-Young but I do know a few things about her. I know that she is personally very nice.
I know that, whatever you think of her policies, she is well-meaning. And I also know that she is a mother.
It might sound trite, but as a mother, I think she had every right to ping this shocking bloke for his vile claims, to force him to apologise, and pay up, and to have his filth expunged from the public record.
Men and women get verbally abused in equal number.
But this case has shown us that they get verbally abused in different ways, and for the womenfolk, it often seems that all roads lead to sex and gender. A bloke you don’t like might be a f...wit or a d...head or a w..ker, but when it’s women who are copping the abuse, they’re sluts, skanks and molls, or any number of disparaging terms that suggest they’re of easy virtue.
We can even find genital-inspired terms to denounce women who commit the cardinal sin of doing their jobs well, by labelling them ball-breakers.
Hanson-Young did everyone a favour here. Not just women, but the majority of decent blokes who don’t want their wives or mothers or daughters treated this way.
At the risk of sounding patronising, it felt to me there was something creepy and weird about the manner in which Leyonhjelm pursued this issue so doggedly.
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I know Hanson-Young is an adult, ostensibly old enough to take care of herself. But what a spectacle it was, a 67-year-old man hammering his weird point publicly at the expense of a woman three decades younger than him.
I note many news websites have disabled comments around this case.
Obviously because it is a legal matter, but also because the moderators would have a hellish time trying to control the flow of vitriol that a left-wing woman like Hanson-Young attracts.
We got one text message to our radio show this week when we stuck up for her, from a bloke denouncing her for giving her $120k payout to domestic-violence services for women.
The guy made the point that if she was a genuine humanist she would have split the money 50/50 between domestic violence services for female victims and male victims.
Ah, mate, the statistics don’t even go close to splitting 50/50, in much the same way that the roll call of sexualised insults seems to be largely one-way traffic too.
I won’t make a habit of saying this, but well done Sarah Hanson-Young.