In maybe another five or ten years it will be;

Belinda, who?

Beth, who?

As quickly as they blazed across the headlines, they will fade from the public consciousness.

The author seems to forget that it is the media who control and manipulate the public consciousness. The media just love sensational headlines and stories.

Of course the people of the media are fully aware that there is a willing public that can be led and guided like a herd of sheep, with tittilating bits of scandal.

So Beth and Belinda got caught behaving badly, more than a few males have had their political careers ended, because they also got caught out behaving badly. Like the scandals that have been plaguing the WA state parliment recently.

Witch-hunting knows no gender boundaries.

We recently has a GG forced to resign due to a with hunt. The same people who called for his resignation championed Henson and his child abuse. Now we have a woman gg who seems to have trouble keeping her mouth shut on political issues but is a darling of the socialist press.

Oh boo hoo, a couple of women get caught out behaving like arseholes and the predictable claims of victimhood surface. Belonda Neal is a nasty second-rater possessed of a huge sense of entitlement who only owns her seat because of who she married and and the other one was busy keeping her sexual partners happy. Neither of them is a victim of anything except their own bad behaviour.

Instead of trying to justify such things, the author would better spend her time praising the vast majority of men and women who don't let their sense of their own power run away with them.

It's notable that the author of the piece is yet another of the group of feminists in powerful academic positions who are careful to mention their feminist credentials as part of their CV. It seems that some have little confidence that their actual accomplishments will stand as evidence of their ability, preferring to rely on "the sisterhood" for preferment. It doesn't give much confidence that her output will be anything other than predictably turgid polemic and so it has turned out.

Hey Antiseptic,
You seem to have missed the point. Though that seems to be going around... The article wasn't excusing the behaviour of these women - it was lamenting the way that whenever women in politics behave like 'a-holes', as you put it, they're attacked in the press not so much for their bad behaviour, but for their status as women.
Kind of the way you've gone after the author of the article, not for her argument, but for her status as -horror!- a feminist.
Which pretty much proves her point…

The best measure of this article's quality is its source.

"Zoo Weekly’s 2008 50 most hated people list"

It is difficult to imagine which is the sadder.

A "top fifty" list from a magazine that targets boofhead 14-25 year-old males.

Or someone who manufactures faux outrage at its "findings".

Verrry interesting …

Ms Neal’s bad behaviour was that of a politician allegedly behaving like a thug at a nightspot and Ms Morgan’s bad behaviour was that of a town planner’s alleged cronyism with a bunch of developers she allegedly hoped to set up a business with in the future.

Yet all Antiseptic can say is …

‘Belonda Neal is a nasty second-rater possessed of a huge sense of entitlement who only owns her seat because of who she married and and the other one was busy keeping her sexual partners happy.’

By reducing the behaviour of the former to that of an opportunist wife and the latter to that of a (nameless) slut, you have proved Sheleyah Courtney’s case so emphatically, Antiseptic, that you could almost qualify as her sock puppet.