The conversations we’re now having about perimenopause and menopause would have been unthinkable a decade ago. But this progress didn’t happen randomly. Women and women’s organisations have spent decades hauling health issues out of the whispering zone and onto government agendas, into budgets and into the mainstream media. So, it was bitterly disappointing, though hardly surprising, to watch One Nation turn Jacqui Lambie’s health issue – a vaginal prolapse into a punchline. The gag sits in Pauline Hanson’s Please Explain cartoon series. Lambie’s animated stand-in clutches at herself and announces she cannot laugh because of her prolapsed vagina. That is the joke. Consider how far we have come. In November 2022, then Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews promised $23 million for 1,500 free pad and tampon dispensers at up to 700 public sites, and said pads and tampons were a necessity, not a luxury. Period poverty was real, and a government was finally saying so. Scotland was the only country that had gone that far at the time. Victoria then ran Australia’s first inquiry into women’s pain. More than 13,000 people took part, and the report that followed in November 2025 made 27 recommendations. Seven in 10 respondents said a health professional had ignored or dismissed their pain. Then Premier Jacinta Allan, who has spoken openly about living with endometriosis, committed to an action plan. In August 2026, the Australian Senate set up its own select committee on women’s health, chaired by Labor’s Marielle Smith, which will hold public hearings across the country. Women in public life are carrying the conversation too. In August, Lambie told the Senate that about six months earlier her vagina had started to prolapse, and that three months later it was taking her bladder with it. She traced it to back injuries from her army service. Specialists are scarce in regional Tasmania, and her Department of Veterans’ Affairs claim was still unresolved, so she paid $7,000 for surgery in Canberra. She was speaking against a proposed $5,000 cap on allied health services for veterans, and she broke down while describing how little the system seems to think about female veterans’ bodies. That is courage. Nobody should mistake it for oversharing. Pelvic organ prolapse happens when the muscles and ligaments holding the bladder, bowel or uterus weaken and an organ slips into the vagina. Childbirth, heavy lifting and hard physical exertion are common causes. One in 12 Australian women is affected by some counts, and other estimates run much higher, because so few women talk about it and so little is measured. Of course, we were never encouraged to talk about this stuff. When we did, doctors rarely listened, and plenty still don’t. We cannot say “vagina” without it being treated as somehow sexual, when it is literally a body part. We do not mention the panty liners, because pushing out babies the size of watermelons left our pelvic floors weak. We do not mention the pain of endometriosis, which affects about one in seven women and takes an average of six and a half years to diagnose. And nobody warned us that perimenopause and menopause could leave us feeling like strangers to ourselves, mentally, physically and emotionally, or that this was normal. The money tells the same story. A Monash University study with The Sisterhood Foundation found that only 3.3 per cent of more than $3.5 billion in Australian research funding went to women’s health. We are half the population. Erectile dysfunction got Viagra, a household name almost overnight after its 1998 approval. Women are still waiting for most medical professionals to just listen to us. Mockery does a particular kind of damage. A woman who has been quietly putting off a GP appointment about a bulge, leaking or pelvic pain hears a Senator laughed at for exactly that and learns again that silence is safer. Shame is why prolapse is underreported in the first place, and a joke at a politician’s expense feeds it. Hanson, meanwhile, brings so much internalised misogyny to the table that it takes the breath away. Whether the subject is childcare, paid parental leave or family violence, which she recently called a “two-way street” on Brisbane radio, she has rarely been the voice in the room pushing for women and girls to have it easier than those who came before them. She and her party choose to be aggressive, destructive and divisive instead. So, let’s push against that and stand with Jacqui Lambie. Buy a mug. Say the word. The Vagina Collection by Jacqui Lambie keeps the conversation going, in partnership with the Hudson Institute of Medical Research. For every full-price mug or tote sold, $5 goes to research into detecting problems early, healing better after childbirth and making prolapse surgery safer. > View this post on Instagram > > A post shared by Jacqui Lambie (@senatorjacquilambie) Lambie put it plainly in the Senate: “Australian women’s vaginas are not made of Australian steel.” Australian steel, one suspects, probably gets more research funding. Independent MP Dr Monique Ryan put it better than most on her Facebook page: “One Jacqui Lambie is worth 1,000 Pauline Hansons.” Share this Jacqui LambieOne Nationwomen's healthWorld Menopause Day by Rita Nasr 15 hours ago ## Stay Smart! Get Women's Agenda in your inbox * Phone This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. * Email SUBSCRIBE ## Latest news ### Women can still be sacked in religious schools for getting divorced or falling pregnant through IVF. 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Last week, Shane Gillis stood on the SNL stage and told the audience, “I haven’t been to the gym in so long I didn’t know women just dress like whores now?” The room responded with a mixture of laughter and groans. He carried on regardless, describing brightly coloured, tight-fitting shorts and joking that men weren’t allowed to look at women wearing them, because they might be filming something for social media. Hilarious. Truly. I’ll wait while the women in your life finish laughing. I had to Google who Gillis was, which says something about how little I’d missed. What I found was a long record of controversial remarks, including his 2019 sacking from SNL over a racist slur. So, the network gave a man with that history the opening monologue, and he used it to critique women’s gym shorts. Progress, apparently. Then came the commentary. The online response was a cesspool of misogyny, and the argument was depressingly familiar: women know exactly what they’re doing. Especially in the scrunch-bum tights. Especially at the gym. They want to be looked at, so really, who’s to blame for being called a whore? I’ve trained in an all-women’s gym. No men, no audience, and women still wore the same activewear you see everywhere. Funny, that. It turns out they were wearing it because it’s comfortable and it works. Here’s what I find fascinating. Some of the same people now explaining that women in tight gym gear are asking for it were, a couple of weeks ago, enthusiastically defending Sydney Sweeney’s near-naked shoot with strategically placed sports equipment. So, a woman is a whore for wearing shorts to the gym, but a woman posing almost nude with a barbell is art, or marketing, or a free-speech issue? The rule is not about clothing. The rule is that women’s bodies belong to the commentary, whatever they do with them. I’ve also seen the argument that this is feminism gone too far. Yes, that’s right. The suffragettes were apparently meant to stop at the vote, and the right to choose what we wear to a spin class was a step too far. Let’s try it the other way around. Men have breasts too. They have nipples for the same biological reasons as women, and men are the ones who sexualised them. So why do I have to look at shirtless men running, lifting and flexing in the gym mirrors? It’s offensive. Clearly, they must be whores. They should put a top on and show some self-respect, otherwise they deserve what they get. See how that works? It’s ridiculous, and it’s meant to be. That is exactly how ridiculous it sounds when it’s aimed at women. What is the male equivalent of “whore,” anyway? I’ve watched plenty of men spend hours at the gym staring at themselves, filming themselves and flexing to feel better about themselves. I don’t look at them and sexualise their bodies, because I’m there to work out and get on with my life. Maybe they should try the same. Dan Levy said it better than most. The Schitt’s Creek star responded in his own Instagram video: “Women wearing short shorts to the gym does not make them whores. It makes the men calling them whores misogynists.” He added that “more men need to be standing up in opposition” to comments like these because “it’s complacency that has created the environment” in which women are sexually assaulted. “Men need to be defending women more. This is not a women’s issue. This is an everybody issue.” He’s right. Men commit the overwhelming majority of sexual violence against women and children, and somehow the conversation still lands on what the woman was wearing. If a woman is at the gym in a sports top and the tightest leggings she owns, that’s her choice. If a man can’t stop himself looking and sexualising every situation, that’s his problem, and it says far more about him than it does about her. Historically and across most cultures, women have been expected to be pure, untarnished and free of previous male attention. Men have not. The result is that women are scrutinised for supposedly promiscuous behaviour while men mostly aren’t, and a whole vocabulary of insults has grown up to police the difference. “Whore” isn’t a neutral word. It carries centuries of shame, and it only ever points one way. Now women are sharing their workouts in whatever they like, partly as pushback. Some men, and plenty of women, are calling them names. Others are telling them to wear tracksuit pants and a T-shirt. And a few, inevitably, are saying relax, it was only a joke. A joke isn’t just a joke when it’s recycled over and over. It has been the same punchline for generations, and we’ve heard it. Shane Gillis should get some new material– in comedy, and to cover himself up. Share this Gymmisogynysexismwomen's bodies by Rita Nasr 1 day ago ## Stay Smart! 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One Nation has released an AI-made ad called ‘Coming Out’. I have watched it, and I wish I could say it was clever, or even creative. It is neither. It is a string of tired stereotypes stitched together by software and pushed out to stir up fear. It opens on a suburban lawn with a “Vote 1 Greens” sign, then cuts to a family dinner. Dad wears a rainbow shirt with the word “yes” on it and asks for the nutritional yeast for his vegan meal. Mum wears a blue wig. The miserable older son finally blurts out his terrible secret: “I’m conservative.” Mum rips off the wig to reveal bright orange hair styled like Pauline Hanson’s. Dad announces he “voted no” in the 2017 same-sex marriage vote, which Australia answered with a Yes vote of more than 61 per cent. The daughter says she doesn’t want to be a little girl anymore. A fake ABC presenter says we should defund the ABC. Then the ad shows who it really thinks the problem is. A young African man holds a machete and says he shouldn’t be on bail. An Indian man says we should end mass migration. A Middle Eastern looking man wears what appears to be an explosives vest and says he should never have been let into the country. The ad closes on the slogan “Take Victoria Back.” Look at who gets to be what. The white characters are the law-abiding, flag-loving Aussies, even when the joke is on them. Every person who causes trouble has brown or black skin. That is not an accident. Someone made those choices. This week, One Nation’s Victorian deputy leader, Colleen Harkin (pictured above), went on 774 ABC Melbourne with Raf Epstein and defended it. “I don’t accept the premise that it is racist,” she said. She called it “big issues that need to be addressed.” She also said climate change was irrelevant to the Australian economy and that One Nation was serious about rescinding Victoria’s landmark Treaty. When Epstein pressed her on whether the video judges people as members of a group instead of as individuals, she asked: “Would you complain if it was a white-skinned person or a female with blonde hair?” I’m sorry, but what? Colleen, as a white-skinned, blonde-haired woman, of course you don’t see it. I am a culturally diverse woman with coloured skin, and from where I stand, everything about that video is racist. Nobody in it is portrayed as a villain because of what they did. They are cast because of how they look. A blonde woman in an ad is just a woman in an ad. She does not carry the weight of an entire community’s reputation, and she is not shown holding a weapon or wearing a bomb. That is the whole difference, and it is not a hard one to grasp. Not all Africans are criminals, and the overwhelming majority have nothing to do with machete gangs. Not all Middle Eastern people are terrorists walking around strapped in bomb vests. Saying so should not be controversial. It is offensive. It is disgusting. It is grubby politics, and we have had enough. Then there is the AI problem. This is cheap, mass-produced slop, rolling out old tropes at no cost and at enormous scale. It is designed to play on people’s fears, and it spreads racism, hatred and misinformation. Many people couldn’t even tell it was AI. When fake faces can be made to say anything and viewers can’t spot the difference, the stereotypes stop looking like a cartoon and start looking like evidence. What worries me almost as much as the video is the applause. Plenty of people have cheered it on, and that says more about the culture of our country than it does about One Nation. We should be looking at other nations and what hate and division have done to them and saying: not in our backyard. Harkin insists the video is about problems with crime and “social cohesion and where it’s coming from.” If she wants to talk about cohesion, here is a place to start. Social cohesion is not built by pointing at your neighbour and calling them a threat. It is built by knowing them. And here is the part the slogan skips over. Racism, hate and division might get you elected, but they do not bring down house prices. They do not lower your grocery bill or reduce what you pay at the petrol bowser. They do nothing for the family struggling with rent. All they do is teach you to hate the neighbour who might have brown skin and eats tabouli, who did nothing except flee a war-torn country, trying to find peace and security for their family in the land of fairness and opportunity. At what point do we grow up as a country and move beyond these stupid depictions? How many more times do we have to watch the same cartoon villains wheeled out, the machete, the bomb vest, and the brown face at the border, before we admit they are not about crime or cohesion? They are about fear. And fear is cheap, which is exactly why they keep using it. A fair go is supposed to be who we are. It is the promise that brought my family, and so many families like mine, to this country. I know this country is better than that ad. Most Australians do not look at the people next door and see a threat. They see someone to wave to on the way to work. That is the Australia I know, and a few seconds of AI-generated slop does not get to rewrite it. Racism, hate and division have never lowered a grocery bill, and they never will. We should be saying “not in our backyard, and not with our vote”. Share this AIOne Nationracism by Rita Nasr 6 hours ago ## Stay Smart! 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