Julia Gillard: Australian blokes have done their country down - Telegraph

Then there was the recent fund-raiser for another senior opposition figure, Mal Brough, where a menu produced for the restaurant owner said it served “Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail – small breasts, huge thighs and a big red box”. The next day she was asked live on air by radio host Howard Sattler if her partner Tim was gay. Just imagine. That question was asked of the prime minister of Australia. It took me back to Britain in the 1980s, where a largely successful battle was fought to end the use of racist or sexist abuse in public discourse. Australia is 30 years behind......

The irony is that, though she could have done so, Gillard never sought to gain advancement in her career by playing on being a woman. She ended up reaping all the disadvantages and none of the benefits. And it was only late in the day of her career, in that extraordinary speech, that she spoke the truth about misogyny in words that men and women alike in Australia and beyond knew to be true. She may just, as she said in a valedictory speech that was typical of her calm reason, have made it easier for the next woman prime minister of Australia.

Indelibly.

I suppose everybody has a time which is theirs.  Middle age seems to be related to my own genetic picking.  I can be me, arrivedly.

To be unwritten...to have unwritten....no meaning granted to youthful images or ideals.

I like the formulated structure.  I've written everything down.  Written stuffs.   My face also has a written quality.  The video in which I like myself best looks most etched.  I hadn't slept too much the night before as I'd taken an antihistamine (now deemed to give me sleepless nights) and I'd been reflecting the whole night on Julia Gillard's fall from power.  That video reveals my intense philosophical disposition.

What's clear is that, had patriarchy inscribe on me, I'd be in a lot of trouble right about now.  It didn't write me as I wrote myself.

Most people don't get to live their ideals, but I've made things work out perfectly.  I've solved all my intellectual queries, resolved all the psychological issues, married happily, sans child.

I've pursued, pretty much, a military and sexual dimension...of reality.   I like those things because I like them.

The English language doesn't please me even now, but here it is.

I like stuff I've created, not so much the stuff I didn't fucking do.

From the outset, her detractors launched on her gender as a weakness - and it was. The opposition never let the public forget her gender and the media crucified her. Rhetoric and vitriol that even the caustic conversation of Australian politics would not allow of a male leader was unleashed with a rare bodily hatred.
Opposition MPs reminded the public that the childless and unmarried Gillard was "deliberately barren". The opposition leader and members of his shadow cabinet stood in front of protest signs describing the PM as a "bitch" and "witch". Radio commentators suggested her beloved father "died of shame" and that she should be "dumped in a chaffbag and thrown out to sea" and asked, to her face, if her partner was gay. She was criticised after showing her cleavage in parliament, and even Germaine Greer appeared on television to say that Gillard's "arse was fat". She was scrutinised for what she wore, for her past lovers, held up to ridicule for liking to knit. Opposition MPs appeared at dinners where her "small breasts, big thighs and red box" were literally on the menu. A chaffbag was auctioned at a Young Liberal dinner. Some opposition MPs even physically bullied her in a Parliament House hallway.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/10143834/Julia-Gillard-ousted-by-sexism-Achievement-does-not-equal-respect-if-youre-a-woman.html

It's deep in our subconscious--the whole Christian version of things. Maleness is ultimately righteous, even though susceptible to normal human weakness and sin. Femaleness is devious and corrupt (Eve in the garden). So we keep replaying this myth again and again, and the wrong people get rewarded and others suffer

The worst thing is, it rings true. If someone points out that a random woman is weak, we instinctively feel it to be true -- without having to know the facts.