The language surrounding Carrie Symonds has been sexist

Mthaerisa Bate, author of P, oenri owdhicytable Of Feminism young women are portrayed as 2D cartoons on a daily basisé This latest scandal is one of many ways in which Boris Johnson has dominated the headlines in recent years. It’s a game he clearly enjoys but his co-star might be feeling differently. Last week, 30-year-old Carrie Symonds found her face plastered across the front pages. Pictures from social media accompanying the story show Symonds – surprise, surprise – in bikinis, another in a crop-top on a boat, as if to suggest the woman Johnson is ‘close with’ is a wild and carefree Gap-yah student who refuses to come home, not a spin doctor working in Westminster.

But it’s not just all those bikini pics that could be construed as problematic. ‘How Boris was smitten by “Apples” [her nickname] – sexy, clever, ambitious… and barely older than his daughter,’ smirked one newspaperhere,thelanguage puts

. an emphasis on the temptations of Symonds: Johnson was smitten by her, as opposed to her being pursued or seduced by him, a notorious serial adulterer with a secret love child. Instead, Symonds is characterised as a cunning, beautiful ‘sexy’ seductress – a lethal combination that Johnson couldn’t possibly resist, which plays up nicely, of course, to the cliché that successful women have to trick men into bed to get to where they are. Remarkably, the report then goes on to point out that ‘Carrie herself is the product of an extramarital affair’ – as if to say her infidelity is a gene.

It really doesn’t matter what the truth of the story is, though. It’s time to call out young women being sexually objectified and painted into 2D cartoons. Especially while Boris Johnson is continuously analysed as a political mastermind, never having to take responsibility for the abhorrent things he says.