Imagine if a male Liberal politician said to a feminist activist: “Stay in the kitchen, darling.”
Imagine if he said uppity women who take to the streets to fight for their rights would be better off at home, looking after the kids or darning socks.
There would be uproar, right?
The Nine Newspapers press would overflow with think pieces on misogyny. ABC bigwigs would furiously commission discussions about old white men’s fear of liberated women.
And rightly so. The vast majority of us believe in sexual equality. People don’t take kindly to women being demeaned as the lesser sex.
And yet, something very similar to this scenario took place on Australian TV this week and the right-on barely batted an eyelid.
It wasn’t an old white bloke who said it, though – it was a hip non-binary activist in a skirt and heels.
His name is Deni Todorovic. He was on Q+A. And in a clash with the Liberal Victorian party president Greg Mirabella over Moira Deeming, he said something that I believe was deeply misogynistic.
Deeming, of course, has been suspended from the Victorian Liberal party for the supposed crime of attending Kellie-Jay Keen’s Let Women Speak gathering in Melbourne.
That’s the one at which oafish far-right idiots turned up, uninvited.
Todorovic said Deeming “got off way too easily”. She should have been expelled, he said. Yes, we can’t have women exercising their right to express themselves in public.
Then he said something genuinely repugnant. He slammed Deeming’s “audacity” in attending the event and said: “Stay in bed and watch Rage, doll. Like seriously, stay at home.”
Read that again. *Stay at home, doll.* What decade is this?
Doll? Who does he think he is speaking about? Deeming is a woman, an established politician and a mother of four. She’s no one’s doll. She’s not some second-class creature who can be instructed by a man to stay home and watch late-night music videos on TV.
Just imagine the storm if Peter Dutton had been on Q+A and had said about someone like Van Badham, “Stop going on about politics, darling. Just stay in bed.”
There would be a national meltdown. So why is it okay for Todorovic to speak so degradingly about Deeming?
Is it because she’s a Liberal, and the woke don’t care about women like that? Or is it because Todorovic calls himself “non-binary” and wears women’s clothing?
Call me old-fashioned, but I believe misogyny is always wrong, whether it’s coming from an old fella in a stiff suit or a young activist in blue eye shadow.
No one comes out well from this disturbing incident. Todorovic certainly doesn’t. The audience doesn’t – they laughed at his suggestion that the Deeming doll should stay in bed.
The presenter, Stan Grant, doesn’t. He failed to challenge Todorovic on his use of the word “doll”. Does Grant think it’s acceptable to call women dolls? Does the ABC?
And the Liberals don’t look good, either. Why didn’t Mirabella push back harder against the insulting of one of his colleagues? The Victorian Liberals’ suspension of Deeming was shameful. It was a yellow-bellied capitulation to the woke mob.
Deeming had no idea those fascist loons would opportunistically try to attach themselves to the Let Women Speak event. She merely wanted to express her perfectly legitimate view that women are real and women’s rights matter.
To punish Deeming for what a bunch of Sieg Heiling men did is cowardly, intolerant and sexist. If the Liberals won’t defend freedom for one of their own women, how can we expect them to defend it for anyone else?
Let’s be clear about what is happening here: a woman with a principled and personal interest in preserving women-only spaces has been monstered in the most horrible way.
Deeming has spoken about being sexually abused as a child and sexually assaulted in adulthood. This is why she is passionate about women’s rights and privacy.
It is extraordinary that such a woman has been witch-hunted and shamed. That she is mocked as a “doll”. That she is told to stay home. That woke audience members at the ABC cackle as she is disparaged.
Never let the right-on pose as a friend of women again. For we now know that if a woman expresses a view they disapprove of, they will throw her to the wolves. Bye, doll.
Sexism has had a makeover. We might call it misogyny in drag. Intolerance of women’s voices no longer comes from dinosaur blokes who are nostalgic for the 1950s but from youthful activists who worship at the altar of gender fluidity.
Their post-science, post-truth belief that anyone can be a woman – even a man – has led them to view womanhood as a frivolous, flimsy thing, and to view any woman who stands up for biological truth as a bigot.
I was brought up to respect women, to treat them as my equals, and to expect that they will enjoy every right I enjoy. I don’t want to see such equality overturned, whether by sexist throwbacks who think sheilas should stay in the kitchen or postmodern activists who think they should stay in bed.
Wake up, Australia! We’re a coin toss away from a mass casualty attack
People are planning it. They are itching to do it. It will finish off Albanese’s leadership as sure as it will harm the innocents among us.
The very real danger of the ‘cashed-up boomer’ stereotype
I’m a widowed, sometimes lonely 80-year-old in the early stages of dementia — and also, apparently, a repository of untapped wealth. Many of my elderly friends are being badly mistreated by their children.