Sexism racket busted
SERENA Williams was liberating women by smashing her racquet on court in the US Open final.
She was flying the flag for the sisters when she ranted and hurled names at the umpire.
She was fighting the good fight for equality when she disrespected the woman with the racquet standing forgotten on the other side of the net.
So be proud when your daughter unravels on a schoolyard tennis court. When she launches into her coach, make a video of her roar and put it online to Helen Reddy’s 1971 hit I Am Woman. Codswallop. Williams should have apologised to the umpire and her opponent. She lost it. She is human and she broke under the intense pressure of a nation’s expectations. It’s hardly surprising.
Apologise, Serena, and we all move on.
Instead she played the victim of sexism. Former tennis great Billie Jean King supported her, saying that when women blow up they are called “hysterical” while men are called “outspoken”.
That may be the case in some, even many, situations, but not this one.
Aussie bad boy Nick Kyrgios’s antics on court are not regarded as outspoken, they are pilloried.
Tennis great John McEnroe was condemned for tantrums. Once at the US Open, umpire Richard Ings gave him a warning, a point penalty and a game penalty.
Where the game penalty dealt to Williams at Flushing Meadows this week by umpire Carlos Ramos hurt her chance of winning the second set, the one delivered by Ings to McEnroe cost him the set.
Williams’s use of sexism to excuse her behaviour deserved the laconic wrath of News Corp cartoonist Mark Knight, who employed exaggeration — a staple in a cartoonist’s satirical armoury — to tear off the charade of virtue and reveal her performance as nothing but a childish hissy fit. But Knight was blasted. Novelist J.K. Rowling tweeted, “Well done on reducing one of the greatest sportswomen alive to racist and sexist tropes and turning a second great sportswoman into a faceless prop”, and Aussie basketball gun Ben Simmons said the cartoon was disrespectful.
The Herald Sun’s page-one response to critics was to show Knight had drawn prime ministers, businessmen, presidents and other tennis players with just as much derision and ridicule.
The cartoon was in the Aussie tradition of demanding that respect be earned by authorities, whether sporting greats or political leaders.
Celebrity and officialdom do not guarantee respect in Australia. If those on the pedestal do not deserve it, they don’t get it.
Not so long ago the West stood in rare solidarity with French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo after 12 employees in its Paris offices were killed by Muslim terrorists offended by the publication of cartoons of Muhammad.
People took to the streets to defend free speech.
If it’s OK to take on an Islamic deity, why not someone who is good at hitting a ball?
Or is it “Ju suis Serena” now?
THERE is real and widespread discrimination deserving of our attention.
The US President has made so many dubious comments relating to Mexicans, African- Americans and women that he is considered sexist and racist by many. And it’s little better in Australia.
We just endured a bungled political coup in the Liberal Party, after which women in the party complained of appalling behaviour.
Liberal MP Julia Banks is quitting because of “bullying and intimidation”. She and Liberal senator Linda Reynolds complained publicly about it in recent weeks. In a speech at a Women’s
Weekly forum last week, former Liberal deputy PM Julie Bishop said: “I have seen and witnessed and experienced some appalling behaviour in Parliament, the kind of behaviour that 20 years ago when I was managing partner of a law firm of 200 employees I would never have accepted. Yet in Parliament it’s the norm.”
Only one in five Coalition MPs is a woman. They make up 50.7 per cent of the population, but women have less than a third of the representation in federal politics. It’s appalling.
Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins spoke at the National Press Club in Canberra this week to reveal that a 2018 sexual harassment survey of 10,000 Australians found one in three said they were sexually harassed at work in the past five years. “Our survey findings indicate that sexual harassment is endemic in Australian society,” she said.
As for the racism facing Australian Aborigines and the disadvantage so many are born into — it’s shameful.
Address these and the many other cases of sexism and racism in our society and it could be game, set and match for discrimination.
WHEN your children, whether boys or girls, spit the dummy on the tennis court, gently tell them that we all feel cheated at times but that we must respect ourselves, the umpire, our opponent and the game by carrying ourselves with dignity.
When your little darlings show understanding by saying sorry, just move on and compliment them on their second serve.
It’s a tough lesson that many of us struggle to learn, but civilisation is founded on civility, which is what most of us know as good manners.