The media's obsession with progressive women
From Chatfield to Lattouf, why scrutiny skews left.
Opinion: Sexism has always been pervasive in the media industry. But in recent years, as our politics has grown more polarised, and our descent toward fascism has hastened, the headlines have felt more venomous, writes Cheek’s editor Kalila Welch.
Australia’s mainstream media is obsessed with progressive women. Once you start paying attention, it’s difficult to look past.
Sexism has always been pervasive in our industry: in print, on camera, and behind the scenes, too. But in recent years, as our politics has grown more polarised, and our descent toward fascism has hastened, the headlines have felt more venomous. The second-coming of Pauline Hanson has injected dog whistles into popular vernacular, selling racism to the masses. But the media’s relentless harassment of left wing women - particularly those who despise Trump and support Palestine - is also communicating something implicit. Stay quiet. Be nice. Toe the line. Don’t challenge the status quo. Know your place.
It is not a coincidence that young Australian women are the most politically progressive voting bloc, and are increasingly shaping our political landscape - especially online. Even Sky News has reported that young women are ‘far more left wing’ on economic policies, meaning they are at odds with the corporate interests that back much of the media establishment.
Take Abbie Chatfield. Outspoken, sex-positive, and proudly progressive, the media has put Abbie through the wringer ever since she shot to fame on the Bachelor in 2019. The tabloids immediately cast her as a divisive figure, and her advocacy on First Nations issues, LGBTQ+ rights, sex workers, abortion access, and Palestine - a non-exhaustive list - has served as further fodder for those seeking to characterise her as a radical or dangerous leftist. It goes without saying that the suggestion that any of these causes are radical is absurd, but from a media class that paints even the most moderate tax reform as “communist”, it’s pretty well par for the course.
Abbie has spoken at length about the relentless media scrutiny she’s subject to over the years - journalist and femicide activist Sherele Moody calculated that the Daily Mail has published more than 680 articles about her since July of 2020. In the last month alone, Abbie has made two direct pleas for the media to leave her alone, following reports her politics had lost her a permanent gig at radio network ARN - a gig she says was never offered to her in the first place.
A week later, the media spiralled with speculation linking the cancellation of her musician boyfriend’s US visa to an offhand joke she made about US President Donald Trump almost a year prior. There was no interrogation of the insanity of the US border force using “national security concerns” to justify revoking the visa of a mainstream Australian artist. Instead, Abbie was scrutinised so severely that she responded with an apology video clarifying that she does not support political assassinations. Can you imagine a man being forced to do the same?
Abbie might be the current victim of choice, but it’s far from the first time we’ve seen Australia’s mainstream media partake gleefully in the takedown of a progressive woman - it’s not even the first time this year.
After leading a chant of “globalise the intifada” at the Herzog rally in February, former Australian of the Year Grace Tame faced a smear campaign so aggressive that she lost all of her remaining speaking gigs for 2026. News Corp’s national masthead, The Australian, has written 15 articles about Grace in the three months since - and it’s abundantly clear they have taken every opportunity to campaign for her downfall since she first came into public view. We also cannot ignore the role of Australia’s pro-Israel lobby in helping to secure her fate - as it has for countless prominent women (and men) who have spoken out about the genocide of Palestinians.
Women of colour are treated even worse than their Anglo counterparts, subject to the wrath of a media class that is far less tolerant of their ‘mistakes’, ‘controversies’, or delivery of uncomfortable truths. Lebanese-Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf was unlawfully dismissed by the ABC for sharing a Human Rights Watch post reporting Israel’s starvation of Palestinians on Instagram, and the Murdoch media has refused to let her be ever since. The Australian has published more than 50 stories about Antoinette since December 2023, and there are dozens more across its tabloid stablemates. Meanwhile, Antoinette’s own Ette Media revealed a “sustained, coordinated media offensive” targeted at Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah, who had been the subject of more than 800 news articles between October 7, 2023, and April 9, 2026, of which more than half were published by The Australian. Years prior, Muslim, Sudanese–Australian media personality, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, learned just how far women of colour have to fall, after her 2017 comments on offshore detention were met with vitriol so intense that she was forced to leave the country. Yassmin was made into an example - a warning to any non-white woman hoping to make a successful career in the media: speak up at your own peril.
In all of the cases above, the “controversial” views of progressive women are positioned as a moral failing. Those who threaten the status quo are painted as wicked; a danger to children, the unborn, white Australians, themselves - whatever the purported victim of the conservative moral panic of the day.
It’s not to say that left-wing men aren’t also dealt with roughly by a conservative establishment, but that the coverage is never quite as hysterical, personal, or lasting as it is for their female counterparts - who also tend to be held to much higher standards by their own side, and scrutinised accordingly.
And as for the growing number of male media stars dipping their toes into the politics of the far right? It’s play on! Karl Stefanovic might have earned a fair few headlines of his own since launching his own podcast, posturing for an exit from Nine, and signing onto a new radio show with ARN, but the coverage has been excruciatingly soft and uncritical - and that’s despite the fact he is dealing in ideology that actually skews into political extremes. Lucky for Karl, the narratives he’s platforming - mass immigration, great replacement theory, the gas lobby paying their fair share of tax… - are all far more palatable to the likes of the Murdoch press than calls for social justice, economic redistribution, and more transparency in politics.
I hope you can read this wonderful piece about Mary Beard. Explains so much how historically women have been treated.
She received rape threats for appearing on television to talk about ancient Rome.
Her response was to spend three years proving that the impulse behind those threats was at least three thousand years old.
Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics at Cambridge University. For most of her career, that meant academic papers read by other scholars, lectures for students, and quiet research in libraries. She studied a civilization that collapsed fifteen centuries ago.
Then she started appearing on BBC documentaries.
She was brilliant on screen. Accessible and funny, making two-thousand-year-old history feel urgent and alive. Audiences responded immediately.
But Mary didn't look like what television had decided female presenters were supposed to look like.
She was in her fifties. Long gray hair. A distinctive gap in her teeth. Zero interest in conforming to camera-ready beauty standards. She dressed like a professor because she was one.
The internet responded with extraordinary viciousness.
She was too ugly for television. She should stay in the library. She had a face for radio. And then — when she began speaking about politics and contemporary issues, the ordinary territory of male public intellectuals everywhere — the abuse escalated into something darker.
Rape threats. Death threats. Graphic descriptions of violence. In 2013, after she appeared on a BBC program discussing immigration, a man tweeted a detailed threat of genital mutilation. He faced prosecution. The threats kept coming.
Most people would have retreated. Quietly deleted social media. Stopped appearing publicly. Decided the cost was too high.
Mary did the opposite.
She started studying why this was happening — not as a psychologist analyzing individual trolls, but as a historian analyzing a pattern. She applied the same rigorous analytical tools she had spent decades bringing to ancient Rome and turned them on the present moment.
What she found stopped her cold.
This wasn't modern. It wasn't the internet. It wasn't a new problem created by anonymity and social media.
It was ancient.
In 2017, she published a book called *Women & Power: A Manifesto.* One hundred and fifteen pages. Three thousand years of evidence.
She begins with Homer's Odyssey — written around 700 BCE, one of the foundational texts of Western civilization. Early in the story, Penelope comes downstairs and asks a bard to stop singing a song that upsets her. Her son Telemachus — barely an adult — stops her.
*"Mother, go back upstairs and tend to your own tasks. Speech will be the business of men."*
This is one of the first scenes in Western literature.
A man telling a woman to shut up and go back to women's work. That public speech belongs to men.
Mary traces the pattern forward three thousand years without it ever fundamentally changing. Roman women who spoke publicly were described as barking or yapping — animal sounds rather than human speech. Women who claimed religious authority in medieval Europe were labeled witches or heretics. Elizabeth I had to rhetorically transform herself into an honorary man — *I have the body of a weak woman but the heart and stomach of a king* — simply to claim the authority to lead her own country.
The pattern is consistent across millennia. Women are welcome to hold private influence. To whisper advice to powerful men. To work behind the scenes and shape decisions without ever being seen to make them.
But public authority — the power to speak, to command, to be heard and obeyed — has been coded as masculine since the Odyssey.
Mary's argument cuts deeper than simple exclusion. Power itself, she argues, has been defined in ways that make women's authority feel unnatural. Transgressive. Wrong. Even when women reach positions of leadership, they face impossible double binds — too feminine and they're weak, too assertive and they're threatening, too competent and they're unnatural. Male leaders are simply leaders. Female leaders are permanently negotiating a trap built before they were born.
This isn't individual failure.
It is structural design.
Mary Beard holds some of the most impressive academic credentials in Britain. Dozens of scholarly books. A professorship at Cambridge. Unquestionable expertise on the ancient world.
When she became publicly visible, the response was not engagement with her ideas. It was attacks on her appearance, her age, and her right to speak at all. Strangers threatened her with sexual violence — threats designed specifically to remind a woman that her body can be violated for the crime of having opinions in public.
She experienced in 2013, personally, the exact pattern she had been reading about in Roman texts for forty years.
Her response was not to retreat. It was to document everything, show the full three-thousand-year arc, and prove that this silencing mechanism predates the internet by millennia — that it is not a collection of bad individuals but an ancient, embedded feature of how Western civilization has always understood power.
She still receives abuse. She also receives messages from women and girls who read her work and felt something shift — the recognition that the barriers they face are not personal failures. Not evidence that they aren't good enough, assertive enough, or leadership material.
The definition of leadership was simply designed without them.
Mary Beard is sixty-nine years old. She has spent her career studying dead Romans and became one of the most important voices on living power structures.
She proved that if you want to understand modern misogyny, you need to understand ancient misogyny.
Because the tools have changed — Twitter instead of the Roman Forum — but the impulse behind them is identical.
*Keep women out of public authority.*
Mary's response was to take three thousand years of that impulse and hold it up to the light — every document, every law, every threat, every dismissal — and say clearly and without flinching:
We can see you. We have always been able to see you. And we have the receipts going back to Homer.
#fblifestyle
Cheers
Charles Cowell
I read this piece yesterday, and the comment from Charles Cowell below, and truthfully I can't get it out of my head. It feels very defeating to see the vitriol for women so prominent, violent and personal. It's almost like there is a large portion of men who would rather have social injustices and war crimes than support (or even just tolerate) a woman trying to make a positive change to that. Instead, we not only have to scream louder than men to be heard, but also be mentally stronger and more resilient to threats to our lives. When does it end?