‘Piggy’ insults and bananas as gifts? Women’s cool professionalism should have a limit

3 months ago 15

Opinion

November 21, 2025 — 11.00am

The first humiliation in my career was also the most low-key. Almost inconsequential. It was just that it kept happening and I did nothing about it. Kept smiling, kept hating it, kept it to myself.

I’m 18, a baby newspaper cadet, pinching myself about this job and new life. Except on the days I’m sent out with a particular photographer. He’s red-faced, obsequious, squeezed into a jumper with an eggy stain on one sleeve.

Matildas star Mary Fowler has revealed that she was given bananas instead of flowers when she was farewelled by a teammate at French club Montpellier.

Every time we get in the car, he leans across me to get the Melways from the glove box. Grazes my leg with sausage fingers. Sometimes follows up as we drive by asking if I have sex with my boyfriend.

That’s it. Nothing dramatic. Yet I’m still thinking about it 40 years later. Still wishing I’d reported him, although even then I knew why I didn’t. I had no power. Feared being branded a troublemaker and sent packing.

Even decided it toughened me up for other encounters. The pop star who invited me to his hotel room, mentioning using a piece of fruit on me. The Collingwood player who chased me around a clubroom. The Essendon player who kept his penis lolling out of his shorts during an interview.

Different men, same expectation of getting away with it.

Other female colleagues had the same problem with predatory behaviour. We slapped away hands, ignored innuendo, thought it could be worse.

Stayed silent. Even, or maybe especially, the copy girl tricked into a tryst with a co-worker – now a well-known businessman – who invented a cancer diagnosis and said having sex with her was his dying wish.

That history is why last year I felt protective seeing a fellow female reporter get kissed in the workplace. Asked in this masthead if it’s okay to do that. That question generated tons of headlines, radio discussions, death threats and a Media Watch stitch-up but no actual answer.

Those experiences are why this week, seeing two women face workplace humiliations, I feel furious for them and every woman still putting up with this shit on the clock.

Catherine Lucey, Bloomberg’s White House correspondent, was told “quiet, piggy” by the US president after she asked him a question. Unbelievable. And shattering that in 2025, Lacey felt her best choice was to cop it.

I wonder whether in that second, she weighed up clapping back, or whether she knew that when the story came out it would be proof anew of the calibre of the man demeaning and shutting her up.

Then there’s Matildas star Mary Fowler. In her new book Bloom, Fowler reveals her torment when she and another black teammate were given farewell bananas instead of flowers when departing from French club Montpellier.

Aged 19 then, Fowler has since “tried to justify it in many different ways”.

Ah, Mary. You don’t have to justify anything. But I get why you stayed quiet. So do zillions of us who’ve done the same thing and beaten ourselves up over it.

Mary Fowler celebrates scoring a goal during a match between the Matildas and Korea Republic in Newcastle in April.

What connects these moments for me is the truism that girls are trained early to protect other people’s comfort. Be nice. Respect authority. Don’t make a scene. Don’t be “that woman” who can’t take a joke or makes everything about gender.

We’re praised for absorbing humiliation. But when girls are raised to be good instead of angry – to take the bananas, the insult – they’re conditioned to wonder if they’re overreacting.

As I did, they calculate in real time whether speaking up will cost more than staying silent. And almost always arrive at the same answer.

I worry that when these moments happen at the highest levels, they create tacit permission that could cascade through every workplace.

If the president can shush someone and criticise their body publicly, why can’t the middle manager? If a famous club can be racist, why can’t your boss?

Both Lacey and Fowler reacted to workplace shame as they were trained to be. Composed. Professional.

But professionalism shouldn’t require swallowing degradation. And it shouldn’t eclipse rage and frustration that these women had to taste it at all.

Kate Halfpenny is the founder of Bad Mother Media.

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