Regardless of how you felt about Julia Gillard as a politician, it is hard not to give her props for her iconic speech tearing Abbott a gaping new one over misogyny.
While there’s plenty of legit criticism you can lay on the Labor Party, her brief prime ministership was chock full of bullshit sexism as Australia showed its more backwards side the moment we finally got a woman leader.
In case you need a refresher course on the biggest smackdown in hashtag auspol history, take a gander:
She played it pretty coy after it happened, but now that she’s safely out of the public eye, she’s opened up about how horrible it was putting up with the ratbag sexists, talking about it on the first episode of pop-pysch author Malcolm Gladwell‘s new podcast “Revisionist History“.
You might know Malcolm Gladwell as the guy behind the (now mostly discredited) “10,000 hour rule”, referring to the 10,000 hours of dedicated practice it takes to become an expert in anything, which turns out to be a bloody huge amount of time when you crunch the numbers.
Gillard gets right into it, talking about how she couldn’t acknowledge the attacks without appearing compromised:
“It’s obviously not a good thing out on a scene of protesters and see yourself described as a bitch and a witch.…[I took] a deliberate decision that if you looked like you couldn’t take it, if you looked upset, then that would be used against me personally, but more importantly against women generally – that they’re would have been people muttering to themselves ‘ugh, I knew women weren’t up to this, I knew women couldn’t take it when the going got tough’.”
It’s kind of weird to think of how that must have been for her as an actual human being, instead of just as a politician.
The podcast itself is quite interesting but the Julia stuff starts at around the 25 minute mark if that’s your game:
Photo: YouTube.
