All media eyes are on Sarah Hanson-Young's defamation suit against Zoo magazine over a 2012 article that included an image of the Greens senator's face photoshopped onto the body of a lingerie model.
Crikey asks what implications the case could have for The Daily Telegraph, which has recently depicted former speaker Peter Slipper as a rat and Kevin Rudd and Anthony Albanese as bumbling characters from Hogan's Heroes. Similarly, Fairfax's The Vine compares Zoo's Hanson-Young image to the Telegraph's depiction of then communications minister, Stephen Conroy, as Joseph Stalin.
While the Murdoch press' ludicrous comparisons of centrist Australian politicians to genocidal, authoritarian tyrants needs addressing (if for no other reason than they are an insult both to the intelligence of the public and the actual victims of genocide), Zoo's treatment of Hanson-Young is an altogether different beast.
The Telegraph's attacks on Labor politicians, while clearly designed to undermine Labor's chance at the polls, were ostensibly criticisms of the said politicians' policies. The Zoo image, on the other hand, was an explicitly gendered attack that had nothing to say about Hanson-Young's actual stance on asylum seeker policy. It is a classic case of sexualising a woman in order to deflect any danger of taking her seriously.
While NSW supreme court justice Lucy McCallum agreed that Zoo's image was capable of holding Hanson-Young up to public ridicule, she also struck out two of Hanson-Young's key arguments, that the image made the senator appear 'immature' and 'incompetent'. On the latter claim, at least, McCallum is wrong.
There is a quote by the 18th century writer Mary Wollstonecraft that I am fond of repeating because, more than 200 years later, it remains a truism. 'Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre,' Wollstonecraft laments, 'the mind shapes itself to the body and roaming around its gilt cage only seeks to adorn its prison.'
Throughout history, the emphasis place on women's looks has been a key factor in their exclusion from intellectual participation. It was the job of men to think, speak and act while women were merely required to look ornamental.
Clearly this is not a thing of the past, as attested by the spectacle of Tony Abbott parading his adult daughters on the campaign trail and boasting that the best reason to vote for him was his 'not bad looking daughters'.
Haven't we all heard them — those 'compliments' that imply women are to be seen and not heard? 'Don't you worry your pretty little head about that' 'What's a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this?' 'You're too pretty to run for office.' Women, it still seems, don't need to think, they only need to be pleasing to the male gaze. The mind shapes itself to the body.
Zoo's hatchet job on Hanson-Young is a not so subtle reminder that, for all the talk of 'the end of men', ours is still a culture that does not take the arguments and perspectives of women seriously.
Putting aside the outrageousness of 'jokingly' offering sanctuary to asylum seekers in exchange for an Australian senator posing for a lad's magazine, Zoo's actions simply tell us that mouthy women with an opinion can be dealt with by reducing them to sexual objects. And that objectification directly affects how women are perceived. It's hard to be both a sex object and a fully-fledged human being with thoughts and opinions.
Two studies by Name It. Change It, an initiative aimed at getting more women to run for public office in the US, found that focusing on a female politician's appearance leads people to take her less seriously: 'After voters hear language about the woman candidate's appearance, they are less likely to think she is experienced, strong, effective, qualified and confident.' This effect is the same whether the attention was positive, negative or neutral.
Hanson-Young is not the first female politician to be subjected to sexist ridicule. In the 2008 US election, as much undue attention was paid to Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's 'attractiveness' as it was to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's alleged lack of it. As if the size of Clinton's ankles would somehow be an impediment to her leadership.
And I will up bring up the appalling treatment of our first female prime minister only to say it was effective at fostering an environment in which Julia Gillard was widely regarded as incompetent and unsuccessful, even as she was busy being the most productive prime minister, in terms of legislative output, Australia has yet seen.
Beauty and sex appeal, for women at least, is a double-edged sword. Very few of us would not want to be regarded as attractive at least some of the time and to certain people, but the obsession with female beauty is not without historical context.
Photoshopping Hanson-Young's head onto the body of a lingerie model was the cheapest of cheap shots that went beyond holding an individual politician to ridicule. It is a quintessentially gendered attack and stark reminder of what the likes of Zoo magazine think about women.
Ruby Hamad is a Sydney writer and associate editor of progressive feminist website The Scavenger. She blogs, and tweets as @rubyhamad