Sex, Photos and Politics

It was an extraordinary week for women in Australian politics.

On the one hand, Julia Gillard became Australia’s first female Prime Minister – albeit in an acting capacity while Kevin Rudd was at the Bali Climate conference. But as she told the Sydney Morning Herald "I think if there's one girl who looks at the TV screen over the the next few days and says 'I might like to do that in the future', well that's a good thing."

On the other hand, newly elected Labor MP, Maxine McKew - the woman who ousted former Prime Minister John Howard from his seat - was publicly humiliated by the Canberra Times’ decision to publish a revealing front-page photo of her which evoked Sharon Stones’ performance in Basic Instinct.

The photo opportunity was the official Australian Electoral Commission declaration of McKew’s victory in Bennelong. There she sat – elegant in a fawn suit with an enormous grin on her face, giving the appearance of mocking the man she defeated as she locked eyes on the disgruntled looking Howard whose body language highlighted his humiliation. The images seemed to sum-up the election aftermath. But one photo taken from a questionable angle stole the show. Taken front-on, apparently at the height of the seated McKew’s skirt (i.e. from perve’s eye view), the photograph appeared at first glance to suggest McKew was fond of going both ‘Brazilian’ and ‘commando’.

Most of the national print media ran an alternative tasteful, evocative photo taken by the same photographer while The Age ran the offending shot but cropped it above skirt-level. The Canberra Times, however, chose instead to run the sexist, demeaning shot, uncropped in a full frontal assault on its readership. What was the Editor, Mark Baker, thinking? Was it the day of the CT Christmas party? Did he join the darkroom boys in a few filthy jokes and agree to indulge in a ‘Chaser-style prank’? The joke was on him. Talk-back sessions on Canberra ABC station, Triple 6, were flooded by callers complaining about the photograph and the newspaper was inundated by Letters to the Editor – 11 of which were published yesterday under the headline “An Unflattering View of a Historical Political Moment”. Highlights included “Sharon Stone eat your heart out”, threats and promises from angry readers and advertisers to boycott the paper and this: “It looks like Maxine McKew was after the Brazilian vote." Another reader set Mark Baker a fair challenge: “Perhaps the editor could write us a learned piece on the difference between a perve using a concealed camera to film up the dress of a woman on public transport and a newspaper photographer using an unconcealed camera to try to do the same in a public place?"

While it could be reasonably argued that the photographer should have used greater discretion, the real problem is the editorial decision to run that photograph on the front page. It cannot have been unconsciously done but that’s exactly the defensive line being taken by Baker. He told AAP he maintained it was a "tremendous picture". He says it never occurred to him that readers might find it offensive. "There's nothing immodest or undignified about it”, he said. Er, nothing undignified about publishing a large colour shot looking up the skirt of a woman – the sort of photo that, if taken on a mobile phone in the CT newsroom of a female reporter, would likely result in charges of sexual harassment? Get with the program, Mark! In a memo he later sent to CT staff, he wrote: "It was not obscene. It was not voyeuristic. Those suggesting the picture shows more have vivid imaginations." Oh, so readers with filthy little minds are the problem? No, Mark, your lack of tact, discretion and respect for women is the problem.

What makes Baker’s decision to run the photo even more offensive is the fact that, redolent of misogyny, it undermined what should have been a story about female power – of a woman punching through the glass ceiling and claiming the most prized political scalp in the country. Instead, the focus shifted to the sexual exploitation of women and, once again, to the dress code of women in politics.

Until the media figures out how treat men and women in power equally, female politicians will continue to suffer the indignity of the treatment meted out to Maxine McKew – even on a day when a woman is in charge of the country.

UPDATE: J-scribe has learned a female sub-editor at the Canberra Times complained about the photo before it went to print saying she found it "offensive and wrong" but her objections were over-ruled. What would she know? She was obviously just an overly sensitive, hairy-legged feminist!(Seethe)

Below: The front page of the Canberra Times displaying the offending photo