Let's Draw A Line Through Sexist Cartoonists
The Age
Monday June 14, 1999
WHY, you might wonder, is Jenny Macklin getting so hot under the collar about the way our cartoonists depict women politicians? Surely you can't have one rule for the gander and another for the goose. Surely once you and your policies are up for public scrutiny you've got to cop it sweet, whatever your gender. Surely ... Let's stop there for a moment.
The federal Labor health spokeswoman has taken cartoonists to task for their monotonously stereotypical portraits of Democrats leader Meg Lees. She's been shown as Madam Lash, whipping John Howard into line; or as Howard's swooning partner in bed (``He found my GST spot!"); or as the proud mum of a hideous little tax package.
There's nothing new about this, Macklin says. When Cheryl Kernot went over to Labor, she was shown as the bride or the big tease. When Joan Kirner was Victorian Premier, there were endless cartoons of her as the fat, frumpy housewife in polka-dot dress and moccies.
As Kirner relates in her new book, The Women's Power Handbook (written with Moira Rayner), she finally confronted cartoonist Jeff Hook and asked him why he always showed her like that - particularly as she'd never had a polka-dot dress. Hook said he wasn't deliberately being malicious or sexist: he simply had no idea how to draw a woman in power.
That, I think, gets to the heart of the problem. Like much of our society, many of our cartoonists haven't yet come to terms with powerful women. (I'm talking about male cartoonists.)
Political caricature has a long and splendidly savage tradition, and women as regular subjects are very recent arrivals. Historically there has never been much of a need to draw real women because they were never the leaders of men. Occasionally, a queen or a notorious mistress would creep into the overwhelmingly masculine line-up. Nineteenth-century cartoonists liked to draw noble but bloodless women in Greek draperies labelled ``Britannia" or ``Freedom". In the pantomime land of cartoon, the dominatrixes, reluctant brides and frumpy housewives have long been stock characters, but in the old days the roles were taken by male politicians in drag.
This picture still held true in very recent times. My father, the late Arthur Horner, drew political cartoons and other illustrations for The Age in the 1970s and '80s. He did plenty of wonderfully merciless caricatures of prominent women, from Nancy Reagan to Germaine Greer; but although I vividly remember the faces, I can't remember what point, if any, he was making about them. Even in those recent times you didn't really need to make a point about women: most of them weren't important enough.
But what to do nowadays with these inconveniently living, breathing women in power? Slot them in to the old pantomime roles, cross your fingers and hope it works? It doesn't.
The best of the old cartoonists bent the genders and put the fellas into drag to make a funny and cutting point about what the men in power were doing. Putting women into the same roles tells you next-to-nothing about what they're doing: it just makes fun of them for being women.
We seem to be oddly immune to how outrageously discriminatory this is. If a cartoonist made fun of an Aboriginal politician because of his perceived incompetence or dishonesty, we'd probably applaud (albeit cautiously); if he was lampooned simply for being black, we'd be rightly appalled. With women it seems far harder for many people to spot the crucial distinction between being attacked for what you say and do, and being attacked for what you are.
That's not to say that women politicians should be given an easier time than men. We are proud of our cartoonists and we give them licence that we don't give to commentators or columnists. We like them to get down, dirty and personal. We expect them to capture and exaggerate physical appearance in a comical way: nobody argues that a cartoonist should draw a slimmer Amanda Vanstone or Kim Beazley. And when a politician, male or female, falls way short of our expectations, we expect them to go for the jugular.
But at the same time, we should beware of what Professor Mary O'Kane, vice-chancellor of Adelaide University, has called the ``demonisation" of strong women leaders. What happens to women politicians, she has pointed out, is a microcosm of what happens to women in society.
And what the less imaginative of male cartoonists do to those women is a microcosm of the kind of ridicule that has always been used to put upstart women back in their place.
Jane Sullivan is a staff writer. E-mail: jsullivan@theage.fairfax.com.au
© 1999 The Age