The basest of instincts
Who’d have thought we’d still be talking about Basic Instinct? It was a memorable movie only because Sharon Stone crossed and uncrossed her legs, and then only if you thought that was a sexy thing to do.
I cross my legs often, have done since childhood, and I’m at a loss to explain the fixation on making yourself comfortable while sitting.
British Labour MP Angela Rayner has been accused by a tabloid newspaper of deliberately distracting prime minister Boris Johnson with the Sharon Stone act. They sit opposite each other in their parliament. She has legs. So does he, but he wears trousers. And there the matter would rest, only the tabloids get weary of persecuting Harry and Meghan sometimes. Misogyny is always a welcome break.
We had our own version of this in 2001 when Christine Rankin, then boss of Work and Income, retaliated against losing her job and took her case to the Employment Court. Rankin, like Rayner, has legs. She was accused of showing too much of them, wearing large earrings, and having a cleavage. That she had good legs, of which she was aware, was her misfortune. I found watching her accusers – men – giving evidence embarrassing.
They seemed to believe a woman in a top job should dress according to an unspoken code they had a problem explaining. She lost her case, in my belief partly because they thought she was dressing to titillate. They read tarty into what current fashion magazines called fashionable.
Twenty-one years later, little has changed. Rayner, 41, is the deputy leader of the British Labour Party, with a hefty pile of shadow portfolios. She has long hair and nice legs and comes from a deprived background that would move the tender-hearted, if there are any left. Pregnant at 15, she gave birth at 16 and was told she would ‘‘amount to nothing’’. Her background is as a care worker and unionist in the north of England.
She has made no secret of despising the privileged background shared by Johnson and his political cronies, her total opposites. ‘‘We cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute pile of banana republic . . . Etonian . . . piece of scum,’’ Rayner is on record as saying last year; inarticulate to read, as furious statements often are, but frank. She refused to apologise until a Conservative MP was murdered the following month.
Rayner herself has a permanent police escort because of the ongoing threats of rape and death she and her family cope with.
The currently screening British TV series Anatomy of a Scandal deals with the privilege of the British upper class, and its misogyny. It seems eerily familiar even here. So does the misogynist abuse of our prime minister, Jacinda Ardern.
Like Rankin, like Rayner, she has legs, sometimes visible, and is in her early 40s. She is not ugly to look at, and wears clothes well. Unlike them, she has had to deal with a terrorist massacre, a pandemic, and the ensuing social breakdown reflected in the long, ugly protest at Parliament.
We don’t know much about the abuse and death threats she gets, but this week a 39-year-old man from Te Puke failed to show up at the Tauranga District Court to face charges of threatening to kill her. My guess is that, like many others, he resents an attractive youngish woman having the top position in our politics. If she was less attractive, a decade older, and dressed shabbily she might be more tolerable. But she’d still be a woman. As you know, there’s a word for that.