Rita Panahi: Conservative women rarely get the same support and protection as women of the Left

Conservative women like Jenny Morrison rarely get the same support and protection as women of the Left.

The attacks against Australia’s First Lady, Jenny Morrison, are beyond the pale — creepy, sexist and utterly unhinged abuse and lies about a woman whose only crime is being married to the Prime Minister.

That and that alone has earned her an enormous amount of misogynistic vitriol over the years particularly from the Twitter cesspit. But the ugliness reached new heights in recent days with a picture of Jenny watching on as Scott Morrison signed a condolence book for Prince Philip, sending the feral Left into fits of malignant rage.

There were also pictures of the PM looking on as Jenny signed the condolence book but they were ignored and instead a whole narrative about the First Lady being a submissive housewife living a Handmaid’s Tale existence was developed on social media.

Magda Szubanski compares Jenny Morrison to 'The Handmaid's Tale'

Another of Szubanski’s tweets.

Comic and new host of Nine’s Weakest Link, Magda Szubanski, joined the fun, retweeting a far-Left activist that had posted the picture of Jenny and the PM with this: “Good morning to everyone else to whom this feels creepy, chilling, terrifying, ominous, enraging, despairing and utterly, completely f---ing depressing.”

What? How is that a normal response to a benign picture? To that insanity Szubanski added: “I genuinely thought this was a photoshopped Handmaid’s Tale meme. But no. It’s 21st century Aussie life.”

Szubanski went further, sharing an image zooming in on Jenny’s hand over her daughter’s wrist with the thumb and forefinger touching, “What’s this little hand signal thingy??” she asked her followers.

Now, among the sane population the thumb and forefinger touching is the “OK” symbol but among the loopy Left that Szubanski panders to it is a “white supremacist” sign. That foolishness began in 2017 as a joke on online forum 4Chan where users started a hoax to see if they could trick the media into believing the OK sign was a symbol of white supremacy. Some simpletons fell for it, most laughed.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison signing a book of condolence to pay his respects to Prince Philip.

Obviously, the OK sign is not synonymous with white supremacy and any suggestion otherwise is absurd but this is 2021 where people’s paranoid fantasies must be respected and so Jenny Morrison became the target of hideous abuse from those who believe she’s some closet KKK fan. It’s almost funny until you remember these people vote.

If a fraction of the abuse Jenny copped was targeted at a prominent woman from the Left you can be sure that there’d be saturation media coverage, dozens of columns and examination of the deep-seated hatreds behind the abuse, and the sisterhood would rally around the victim. But conservative women rarely receive that sort of support and protection. That’s why it was so refreshing to see James Morrow do a news story on Szubanski’s role in the Jenny pile-on for the Herald Sun, which a number of TV networks followed. Normally such instances pass without any coverage or commentary from the media.

Normal people see a benign picture of the PM & his wife signing a condolence book for Prince Philip.

Twitter Lefties see chilling, terrifying, ominous misogyny, literally handmaid’s tale, sickening & depressing sexism blah blah blah pic.twitter.com/4twUjbPmaW

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) April 13, 2021

Of course it wasn’t just Szubanski “trolling” the PM’s wife. There were thousands of deranged tweets from slanderous claims to commentary about her intelligence, appearance and character. Most of the output of the tolerant, inclusive and progressive Left is too disgusting to reproduce but here is a sample of what we can publish:

Michelle who lists #marchforwomen on her Twitter bio wrote: “I have never hated anyone as much as I hate Morrison … and his bloody wife!!!”

Helen Carter, who lists “feminism”, “social progress” and “support our ABC” on her bio, writes: “Is Jenny not allowed to wear anything nice, ever? She looks like the housekeeping lady”.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison with his wife Jenny Morrison at a special prayer service to commemorate the death of Prince Philip.

Rob Arnol, who no doubt identifies as a male feminist, asked: “Is Jenny not allowed to wear make-up? Because if this is looking your best for a very important occasion, you’ve got problems. A potato sack? God you’d never see Anita Keating look such a mess. Or Therese Rhein (sic), Lucy Turnbull, Hazel Hawke etc.” And this: “She looks more like one of the cleaning staff than wife of the Prime Minister.”

Keen to show their moral superiority, the very same folk who have spent weeks raging against the Morrison government for supposedly failing Australian women were poking fun at a woman’s appearance.

Some of the very same activists bleating about March4Justice and claiming Australia is a systematically sexist country were laying the boots into a woman not for what she has said or done, but what she looks like and who she loves.

Jenny Morrison is not a politician and she has not, like some US First Ladies, inserted herself in policy debates. You can hate on her husband in any manic fashion you desire but leave her name out of your filthy, bile-filled mouths.

IN SHORT

Christine Holgate should still be CEO of Australia Post. She was doing a superb job according to stakeholders and the prime minister’s treatment of her was grossly unfair. The PM thought he could score cheap political points by slamming her purchase of luxury watches but his intervention was ill-advised and ultimately wrong.

Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist

[e-mail]

@RitaPanahi